


We'll Never Sleep (god knows we'll try)

by lesbianophelia



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: 75th Hunger Games, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Fusion, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Angst with a Happy Ending, Body Dysphoria, Childhood Trauma, District 4, Everyone Is Gay, F/F, Finnick Odair is a lesbian, Flashbacks, Getting Back Together, Hijacking, Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Torture, Lesbian Character, Memory Alteration, No Lesbians Die, Non-Chronological, Non-Consensual Body Modification, POV Lesbian Character, Slow Burn, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, The Capitol, fem!Peeta, strangers to friends to lovers to strangers to friends to lovers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-10
Updated: 2018-10-02
Packaged: 2019-06-25 12:58:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 32,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15641229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbianophelia/pseuds/lesbianophelia
Summary: “My working theory is that her torturers wanted to make her as compliant as they could. Even once they realized there was no real information to be extricated, it was too much of a risk, having her hold any allegiances to known or suspected traitors. Such as Johanna Mason, or Katniss Everdeen,” she says. “That last propo would have been not long after they started the treatment. And in the time between that and our successful rescue of the Capitol, they would only have done more, and worse, and . . . rendered her unusable for any future propaganda in the process.”It’s like I’ve been dropped inside of a tin can. The conversation continues, behind and beside and in front of me all at once, and very muffled. What are they saying? And more importantly, what does it mean?“Unusable?” I echo, though I’m not sure how long it’s been since I first heard that word. “No-- what’s--?”





	1. Source Decay

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This is a fic about lesbians, trauma, and dysphoria. It also features stone dynamics and non consensual body modification. Also discussed though not romanticized is self harm. Stay safe! Content warning for lesbophobia in chapter one.

I’m pretending to be asleep when my sister comes home from her shift. She works such odd hours, and she’s always so careful not to wake me when she comes in. She rarely does, though that may mostly be because of how many nights I’m awake by the time she comes home. Of course, this always concerns her, and I know she’s so tired after work that I can’t stand to see her stay up long enough to offer me a cup of tea. 

 

Tonight is different, though. Rather than shuffling straight into her room and falling into the bed, she stays in the little kitchen area and turns on the coffee maker, which only ever gets used before a shift starts. I can’t stand the stuff, but she developed a taste for it quickly. She works so many hours, and today must be yet another one of those back-to-back shifts they’ve been scheduling her for with something like three hours between them.    
  
She’s standing with her back against the granite countertop, eyes closed in what’s likely one of very few moments of rest she’s gotten at all in the last few days. When the coffee maker finishes, she cracks an eye open and startles a little. 

  
“Sorry,” I say, and she blinks, shaking her head a little in an attempt at being dismissive.    
  
“You’re just quiet,” she says, turning to pour herself a cup of coffee.    
  
“You’re working another double?” I ask, and it’s quiet for a moment. I think she’s trying to work out whether or not I’m about to rehash an old argument, and she must be too tired to risk it, because she just sighs. “I just mean -- do you have time for me to make breakfast?” I amend.    
  
I don’t blame her for thinking I was trying to start a fight. It went on for days, and it’s still the angriest I’ve ever seen her, when I tried to insist that she should go back to high school after the war. She was right, anyway. It’s hypocritical of me to insist she finish her education when I didn’t, and I deserved it when she told me that. But she was also right about something else -- that she isn’t a child anymore, and that I shouldn’t treat her like one. She stopped being a child before her name even got dropped into the Reaping bowl. Here she is now, fifteen and, despite my best efforts, as much of an adult as I was at that age. 

 

But now, even as she faces away from me, I can see her shoulders sag a little. A child, still, even with her sixteenth birthday looming close. Tired. Overworked. And still, just as she always was, in need of a mother, and with only me able to even attempt provide that. 

 

“Sit,” I prod, and though she drags her feet, she does take a seat at the island. 

 

I don’t think it was meant as a place to eat originally, just as another space to prep food. But we don’t use the table that my little team and I used to take our meals at for anything other than to house the crates of things that we took back with us after our trip to Twelve.    
  
“The Mellarks are here,” she says when I think she might be falling asleep in her seat, and I crack the egg so hard against the bowl that it runs onto my hands. 

  
“What?”    
  
“Just her parents,” she says. “I’m going to see her doctor as soon as my shift starts,” she assures me. “I think -- she must not  _ know _ . What they’re like.”    
  
Prim has been trying to get in to speak to the doctor overseeing Peeta’s care for three weeks, now, at least, and hasn’t been allowed anywhere near her.    
  
.    
  
I still don’t see her for another month. 

 

. . . 

  
  
I have to sit through a two hour meeting before they allow me to go in to see her. It’s Prim and the doctor -- Doctor Boudicca, who never offers her first name. She was a doctor in Thirteen, I learn, which is far from surprising. There’s no one thing that betrays it. Maybe the tightness of her ponytail or how high up on her hips her pants sit, held in place with both a belt and a pair of suspenders. The way she talks, as well. Every sentence not quite clipped but certainly efficient. Prim looks like she’s seconds away from asking if she can take out a notepad and start writing things down. 

 

I don’t understand most of what she’s saying. I catch some pieces -- that the Capitol has been doing something for years that they refer to, simply, as  _ Enhancement.  _ The process, which she explains using a lot of jargon that makes Prim sit up a little straighter in her seat. What it seems to amount to is that the Capitol has worked out a way to remove certain memories. Doctor Boudicca thinks that the practice itself is reprehensible to begin with, and begins to get side tracked speaking about things like  _ talk therapy  _ that would be better for traumas than to erase them entirely. But Prim, bless her, gently steers the conversation back towards Peeta.    
  
Peeta, who was in the Capitol for a few months during the rebellion, and was forced to undergo  _ Enhancement _ . Only, there was no time to do it responsibly. Ordinarily, each erased memory -- of a partner, usually, or some event that the patient deemed as traumatic, like a bad haircut -- would be removed and then replaced with a simulation of what might have happened otherwise. Something to help your mind to fill in the gaps left behind by the taken memory.    
  
“It means that they didn’t have the time to do this safely. That I’m not even sure there  _ is  _ a safe way to do this. But that one thing they certainly didn’t have with Peeta before we came in was time. We’ve done our best to try to jog some of her memories, and she’s very receptive, but frankly there’s just not the data on having such large swathes of your memory removed.” 

 

“Large as in . . . how much?” Prim asks after a moment.    
  
“My working theory is that her torturers wanted to make her as compliant as they could. Even once they realized there was no real information to be extricated, it was too much of a risk, having her hold any allegiances to known or suspected traitors. Such as Johanna Mason, or Katniss Everdeen,” she says. “That last propo would have been not long after they started the treatment. And in the time between that and our successful rescue of the Capitol, they would only have done more, and worse, and . . . rendered her unusable for any future propaganda in the process.”    
  
It’s like I’ve been dropped inside of a tin can. The conversation continues, behind and beside and in front of me all at once, and very muffled. What are they saying? And more importantly, what does it mean?   
  
“Unusable?” I echo, though I’m not sure how long it’s been since I first heard that word. “No-- what’s--?”    
  
“Now, the patient and I have spoken at length about this,” she says. “They were too ambitious, I think. Trying to remove memories of you from when you were in school together. So there are some blind spots that we were aware would present as issues, but others, too, that seem to be more frustrating for her.”    
  
“You’re saying Peeta doesn’t remember Katniss at all?” Prim asks, and I’m only vaguely aware of her hand squeezing mine. I have no idea when she even grabbed it. Was I the one who reached for her? 

  
“We’ve shown her some footage,” continues the doctor. “But she seems to only recognize her from the first time I showed her the images.”   
  
“No,” I choke. No. My legs move of their own accord, and I let go of my sister’s hand in favor of swiping uselessly at my thighs through my jeans.   
  
“Your brain can create anything to fill those spaces,” the doctor says. “Peeta has been very open to discussion, but I’m not sure exactly what her brain has conjured up in place of Katniss. Sometimes, this could lead to an entirely new set of mannerisms. Which begs the question of what _does_ make someone themselves? She’s made of all the same materials, save a few pounds from her captivity, but--”   
  
She’s still speaking, but I lunge for the door, diving into the hallway before I have to throw up in front of them both and ruin their philosophical discussion. 

 

. . . 

  
  
I wake to the sound of the shutters of the closet rolling off to the side automatically. It isn’t terribly loud, but the whirring is enough to wake me, especially since my foot had been against one of the far panels. I’m not sure when I locked myself into the fancy closet in my Capitol bedroom, but it was long enough ago that my sister clearly has lost her patience for me.    
  
I had been dreaming. About what, I’m not entirely sure. Just that Peeta was there. That Peeta was there, and that I felt -- nice.    
  
But now here’s Prim, scowling down at me. “You have to get up,” she says.    
  
I blink, pulling on my blanket -- no, not a blanket. It’s a sweater. I vaguely remember grabbing the box off the table on my way in, but not this apparent nest I’ve built out of them. It’s no wonder they smell like Peeta. I’ve tried keeping the crates closed as much as possible until now, and I have no idea how much longer they’ll smell like her.    
  
“Let me sleep.”    
  
What else is there to do, anyway? Sit around and listen to how Peeta Mellark not only doesn’t love me anymore, but only recognizes me from pictures her doctors have shown her of me? I can’t go back to that room. And what’s more is Prim can’t make me, and she won’t even really try.    
  
At least, that’s what I think until she says, “I told her that you would be there first thing in the morning.” No emotion, not the pleading I expected. “Get up.”    
  
I close my eyes. Maybe, if I manage to actually fall asleep, she’ll understand. Only, then starts to peel off the sweaters I’ve piled on top of myself, and I tug hard against the last one, keeping hold of it even as she glares at me.    
  
“ _ Up _ ,” she demands. “You waited for so long and you’re just giving up now? Bullshit.”    
  
With this, she turns on her heel and storms out of the room. I’m left with the sweater between my fingers -- Peeta’s favorite, a sunny yellow sweater that she dyed herself. It was machine knit, given to her as a gift by her stylist completely undyed. It starts off darker on the bottom and gets lighter, so pale it’s practically white by the collar. She spent ages fussing about the color before she ever got around to putting any dye on it. 

 

“We’re leaving now,” Prim informs me from the other room, and I can tell that she really is about to leave, because she’s right by where she always kicks her shoes off. I tug the sweater over my head, even though I know it’ll get too hot between that and my cowl, and make a point of showing her how unhappy I am as I tug my own boots on beside her. 

 

And then. “Her mother gets back today.”

 

. . . 

 

The images I had conjured up of Peeta’s hospitalization seem so stupid, now that I see her. She isn’t handcuffed to her bed, or even hooked up to any of the machines that I’m used to seeing in rooms like this. The room is bare, though probably more for lack of anything to bring in than because of any rules about decorating.    
  
I think of the crates of her things that have sat mostly untouched. Should I have brought them with me? Would she want them if I bring them next time? 

 

Peeta herself sits against the wall in a light grey tee shirt that just screams that it’s regulation for patients, pale enough to completely wash her out under the fluorescent lights. Her hair has been shaved, probably right down to the scalp at first, but has developed a fuzz that’s nearly translucent. A cake of undyed wool sits between her bony knees, and her wrists are twisting in these strange, jerky motions that I’ve never seen her knit with before.    
  
And she’s staring at me. Intently, but not like I thought she might look at me, after all this time. Instead, she looks at me like I’m something she needs to figure out. Like she's angry that she doesn't understand. 

 

“Hi,” I breathe. I don’t know what I’m waiting for -- what I’m still waiting for, but her gaze doesn’t soften much. “Do you--?” 

 

“So is someone finally gonna tell me why the fuck Mom doesn't want me to see you, or do I have to keep guessing?” 

I cough.  _ Mom.  _ I’ve never heard her use that word for her mother before. “I'm surprised she hasn't told you.” 

 

“Shouldn't be,” she snaps, ripping the stitches off her needles. Whatever the lopsided shape was, it’s gone now. “No one fucking tells me anything.”    
  
I take a step closer. I’ve seen her angry before, but not at me. Not like this. Her expression, hardened as it is, and -- almost uncomprehending in her anger -- it’s impossible to pretend not to know what she wants. Information.    
  
“Because she hates me,” I admit, though it feels so foreign, having to explain to Peeta Mellark that her mother isn’t exactly my biggest fan.    
  
It’s weak. I know even before Peeta rolls her eyes that it isn’t enough. But I’m a coward, and I can’t lead with anything of any real substance. 

 

“So what did you do?”    
  
It’s quiet for a beat. The corners of her lips pull even further down when she realizes I’m not about to answer.    
  
“Whatever,” she snaps. “If you’re not going to talk--”    
  
_ No _ . “She thinks it’s my fault. That you’re gay.”    
  
A snort. It’s so welcome, the sound of her laugh, that I forget that none of this is funny. But only for a second.    
  
“No,” she says automatically. And then her eyes drop away from mine for just a second. “No,” she repeats. “She doesn’t know.”    
  
“Is that what she told you?” I ask.    
  
“It’s not like we’ve fucking talked about it.”    
  
_ Fucking _ . The third time she’s used the word, already. I’ve only ever known her to use it when she was particularly worked up, and it seems today is no exception.    
  
“Your mother knows.” She flinches, even just at the idea. But I push forward anyway. “You told Caesar, the night before the games. In front of everyone. She was watching.”    
  
She sinks her teeth into her bottom lip, considering this. 

 

“And -- and she’s  _ awful _ , Peeta. She’s cruel, and she’s violent, and she--”    
  
“Stop.”    
  
I do, though I’m not happy about it.    
  


”Why did she send the nurse away?”   
  
“The nurse?” I echo. 

  
“The one I like,” she says impatiently, like that would let me in on who she’s referring to. “She’s too young.” Something like realization crosses her features. “But she’s sweet, and -- looks like you. Your sister?”    
  
“Prim,” I agree. “Yeah. My sister. Your mother sent her away?”    
  
Prim didn’t tell me about that. Of course, she didn’t. She probably thought she was protecting me.    
  
“Yeah. But she didn’t  _ do  _ anything,” Peeta presses.    
  
“Not other than be related to me.”    
  
It’s quiet for a beat.    
  
“Peeta,” I start. But it’s too late. Whatever I was going to say, and I don’t even know, now, dies in my throat when the pressurized doors behind me open.    
  
She stiffens, moving almost imperceptibly closer to the wall behind her, though her face doesn’t betray any of that. Muscle memory, I think.    
  
“What the fuck is she doing here?”    
  
It’s her mother. Who either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care about how terrified the girl in front of us is. Maybe she’s not used to studying her like this. 

 

“Patricia,” she snaps. “I asked you a question.”    
  
“I came in,” I answer before she has to, watching Peeta’s eyes as they flick back and forth between me and her mother. I don’t bother turning to face the witch. Not when I’m not sure how long it’ll be before I even get to see Peeta again.    
  
Her nose has been broken since I’ve last seen her -- again. It’s crooked, though not bruised or swollen anymore. Almost more familiar, this way. 

 

“Is everyone in this hospital completely fucking incompetent, or did you manage to sneak your way around them?” she asks. 

  
“They couldn’t stop me,” I respond, lifting my chin a little.    
  
“And Patricia not wanting to see you didn’t, either, did it?” she asks.    
  
The look she gives me is pleading, though I think Peeta may not even realize it.    
  
“It didn’t,” I agree, though the words taste like acid. “I needed to see her.”   
  
“Of course,” she snaps. “That’s what’s important. Not her recovery.”    
  
It’s quiet for a beat.    
  
“Can’t even look at me when I speak to you,” her mother mutters, almost more to herself. “Typical for a Seam Dyke. They don’t teach you any respect.”    
  
Peeta flinches at the word.  _ Dyke _ . We’ve had it lobbed against us enough times, by now, that I’ve grown so used to it. All of that is undone, now, for her. 

 

“Mom.”    
  
Her voice sounds  _ weird _ . I wish I knew what it was. The hesitance, there, maybe. Like her voice remembers, even if she doesn’t, that she doesn’t call her mother that. Or the fact that she’s trying not to sound like she’s pleading, and Peeta does a lot of things to get what she needs, but she doesn’t beg.    
  
“ _ Peeta _ ,” her mother shoots back, clearly mimicking now, and it’s all I can do not to launch myself at the woman. “What did she tell you?”    
  
“Nothing,” Peeta says. 

 

Mrs. Mellark coughs out a laugh. “She told you something. ‘Else you wouldn’t look so guilty. What, did she say she  _ loves  _ you?”    
  
She’s mocking me outright. Or maybe she’s mocking Peeta. I can’t tell which. 

 

“You’re not a dyke, Peeta.”    
  
Her eyes drop, now. To her hands, to the mattress, I’m not sure which. 

 

“Oh, did she tell you you were?” Mrs. Mellark asks, and sounds -- amused, now. “Sweetheart. It was a strategy. One I don’t think you ever fully signed off on, but that she and that -- that  _ Haymitch Abernathy  _ \-- came up with. To give you an advantage. But you were engaged, anyway, during all of this. Don’t you remember?”    
  
She swallows. “You told me. To -- um, the Donner boy.”    
  
“That’s not true.”    
  
Her eyes flick back up to me.    
  
“Not engaged. You told me your parents decided all of it before you were even born. That it’s half of why they wanted a girl in the first place, so they could--”    
  
“Don’t you think it’s time you left?” Mrs. Mellark asks. 

 

“I don’t see how you think it’ll help if you’re  _ lying _ to her when--”    
  
“She’s  _ my _ child,” Mrs. Mellark insists. “I’ll help her remember what I see fit.”    
  
“What you see fit?” Peeta and I both echo at once, and Mrs. Mellark tries admirably to cover her tracks. 

 

“What, am I supposed to go over every gory detail from the Games? Help her remember every terrible thing that--”    
  
“Being in love with me wasn’t terrible,” I interrupt, finally turning to face the witch. “You shouldn’t speak about things you clearly don’t know anything about.”    
  
“It wasn’t terrible?” she echoes. “Look at where it landed her.”    
  
It’s quiet for a beat. She’s right, of course. Maybe I’m just being selfish.    
  
“So I did love her.” Peeta’s voice is wobbly at best. 

 

“She made you think you did. Made you think you were some kind of bull dyke. But I know you, Peeta. And you won’t do this to me twice.”    
  
“What if she was right?”    
  
My heart slams against my ribcage. Peeta’s eyes are on her mother’s when I whip back around to face her. 

 

“That I was --  _ am  _ . . . a bull -- a lesbian.” She flinches around the words, but then, she always does when she says them. “That you’re just here because you thought if I forgot about her that I wouldn’t . . . love women anymore.”    
  
“It’s not about love,” Mrs. Mellark snaps. “We all  _ love  _ our friends. We don’t want to fuck them.”    
  
“I never wanted to marry Whitley.”    
  
“It doesn’t have to be Whitley,” her mother says, as if it’s simple. “He’s moved on, already, anyway. But we can find you a nice--”    
  
“No.”    
  
“What do you mean,  _ no _ ? You’re not going to let me throw you a wedding?”    
  
_ She already had a wedding,  _ I think but don’t say.    
  
“I mean I’m not going to marry a man,” Peeta says. “And if you think -- if you think keeping her away from me is going to change that, you’re just lying to yourself.”    
  
“Language,” her mother snaps, as if she hasn’t been dropping  _ dyke  _ every few sentences.    
  
“Mom! I’m not a kid!” Peeta shoots back, and then shrinks against the wall immediately when her mother steps towards her.    
  
It’s just -- she’s so small, and so brave, to be doing all this all over again when she doesn’t even remember what happened last time. Before I even realize what I’m doing, I grab Mrs. Mellark’s arm.    
  
The doctors are in so quickly they must have been watching this entire time. I don’t really understand what happened until one of them is prying my fingers from around Mrs. Mellark’s bony wrist and another one is trying to ease my hand from where I’ve grabbed a chunk of her hair. The stinging in my cheek suggests I’ve just been slapped, though. And clearly, all my self-defense training from the arena hasn’t completely evaporated. 

 

Mrs. Mellark is saying things like  _ dyke _ and  _ assault  _ and calling me a  _ little fucking bitch  _ as the doctors hold her away from me, but I’m hardly even paying attention to her.    
  


“Peeta,” the bigger one, the one standing between me and her mother says. “What do you want us to do?”    
  
And then they’re escorting us both out.    
  
. . . 

 

It was almost a full month after the camera crews finally cleared that I first found myself at Peeta Mellark’s home in the Victor’s Village. I hadn’t been invited, and especially not that night, but I wasn’t even considering whether or not I might be welcome when I climbed down the lattice by my bedroom.    
  
I haven’t been avoiding her. At least, not intentionally. At first, it was just that I wanted to spend as much time around my sister as possible. And other than that, I’ve really just wanted to be alone. As a result, I hadn’t even seen Peeta since just a couple of days after we were left in Twelve to try to get back to some semblance of a normal life..She had dinner at my house and stayed downstairs with my mother and Prim even after I had locked myself in my bedroom.    
  
They played cards. Prim told me about it that night when she curled up in the bed beside me, babbling the way she does when she has no idea what to say around me. The only way she seems to talk to me, these days.    
  
_ “She let me win, I think _ ,” Prim said.  _ “Or she was distracted waiting for you to come back down.”  _ _  
_ _  
_ I had long since been pretending to be asleep when she said,    
  
_ “Hey, Katniss? I’m glad they didn’t do that to you.”  _ _  
_ _  
_ _  
_ My sister was asleep in the hallway outside of my room. At least, that was what I assumed. She was last night, when I locked her out. There was something I just couldn’t take in the way she looked at me, it had been there since our Homecoming. The kind of worry you see in someones eyes. Not pity, exactly. Something like it, though. The kind of worry you feel when you already know what the outcome will be.    
  
It was hot enough out already that I didn’t even consider the camisole stuck against my skin until I was already on her porch and trying to pull against the thin straps to try to let some air in through the top. Summer in District Twelve is wet, and that year was the same as always, but I had already gotten spoiled on the fancy air conditioner than my Victor’s Dwelling hums with all day and night.    
  
I hesitated on the bottom step of her porch, but only for a moment. All of the lights on the bottom floor of her house were on. And the windows were open, too. I could smell something sweet that I suspected would  get dropped off at my house first thing in the morning, when she thought everyone was still asleep. So I didn’t feel guilty for banging on her door, except for when I hear the sound of a crash inside.    
  
Like I had startled her, maybe. I tried the handle, but find the door locked. I was just starting to worry about her -- stumbling around in there like that with her new leg but then I could hear her approach the door. She was louder than before, even, at first -- between the stomp of her foot and the drag of her cane, I could track her all the way through the house. 

  
Cold air flooded out through the door -- it was even colder there than at my house. I felt my skin prickle with gooseflesh and considered for the first time that maybe I should have stayed at home..   
  
“Hey,” she breathed. “Katniss. Are you okay? What’s--?”    
  
“I’m fine,” I interrupted, trying to look at least somewhat convincing.    
  
I had managed to forget. Somehow, until she was right here in front of me. I wondered if she could tell -- the corners of her just slightly too full lips turned down as she took me in, and I felt very aware, suddenly, of how underdressed I am. 

  
“It’s late,” she pointed out, blue eyes catching on and then flicking away from the thin straps of my shirt. ”What happened?”    
  
“Yeah,” I said automatically. “Okay. I should--”    
  
“No!”    
  
Her hand grabbed my wrist. Not hard, but enough to ground me there. On her porch, in my camisole and sleeping shorts. Her voice was so anxious that I felt bad for disturbing her in the first place. “Why are you here? What do you need?”    
  
Whatever it was in her voice, I recognized it. The one that promised me anything I could ask her for, even if I had managed not to be around when she came by to visit.    
  


“How much longer are you staying up?” I asked.    
  
Her hold on my wrist loosened. “A while,” she answered. “Come inside.”    
  
  
Her house is the same as mine. Mostly, at least. It’s the same layout, but hers is across the street, and my mother has done some light redecorating in mine. So it’s like being in a slightly more sterile, mirrored version of my house. The fireplace on the far end of the living room probably has the same three paned mirror on top of it with the roses etched into it, but Peeta has hung a white bedsheet over it.    
  
“Prim and your mom, they’re fine?” she asked while I stared at the new fixture.    
  
“Asleep,” I answered. “I think.”    
  
It was quiet for a moment.    
  
“I’ve been in my room. Since yesterday. I--”    
  
I cut myself off at the sound of her exhale as she pushed herself off of the wall she had been leaning against.. My lower lip trembles, though I couldn’t imagine why, and I sank my teeth into it.    
  
It was stupid, going in the first place. I knew that. “I should go.”    
  
“I’m making you dinner,” she said, her voice not quite soft but almost hurt. Like I shouldn’t have thought she was upset ot begin with. “I’ve got leftovers. You should eat.”    
  
Though there was nothing I wanted to do less, I followed her to the kitchen, where I tried not to stare as she heated up something from the icebox in the microwave I haven’t even attempted to learn how to use at my house.    
  
We didn’t speak as I shoveled the leftover meal into my mouth.Now I can’t even remember what it was. Pasta, maybe. Something that felt heavy, with just enough flavor for me to ignore it completely. She put away a few dishes and opened and closed some cabinets, but it really all just seemed like fidgeting. 

 

“Your hair is longer than mine now,” I said absently when I looked up and found her twisting at some of the blonde hair. Whatever semblance of a polite expression she had been holding earlier dropped completely at this and I cursed myself for bringing it up.    
  
It was  _ wrong _ . The new hair they gave her to replace the braid she chopped off with her knife one of those hot nights in the cave. Long and straight, the way they like it in the capitol, and so blonde it was nearly grey.    
  
“I hate it,” she admitted lowly, like maybe she suspected the same thing I did, about our houses being bugged. “I hate this fucking hair. It’s not -- it isn’t mine. But I can feel it. Like . . .”    
  
I hadn’t seen her at such a loss for words before. 

 

“I don’t know how they sewed it in,” she said after a long moment. “I don’t like that they can just. Go in there. Into my skin.”    
  
Her eyes slid shut at this, eyelashes fuller and darker than before, pratically resting on her cheekbones.    
  
I didn’t stay in the room long enough to see them open.    
  
  
I knew what I was looking for. One benefit, at least, to having any differences we may have had before taken away. There were scissors waiting on the desk downstairs. Meant for paper, probably. My mother still has a pair from her merchant days that she kept so sharp, and there weren’t as familiar. Still, I had cut Prim’s hair enough times. 

 

She was poking at some dough I didn’t recognize the shape of when I came back into the kitchen. Didn’t even notice me until I cleared my throat, and then she turned around slowly and said, as if she had been practicing it this entire time in her head,    
  
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have--”    
  
“Let me cut it.”    
  
Her eyes dropped to the scissors. “Tonight?” she asked. “My stylist will--”    
  
“Find a way to survive,” I said, remembering a minute too late that I should have at least tried to make my distaste for the woman a little less clear. “Come on.”    
  
  
She sat on the floor in front of me in her bathroom and I sat on the edge of the deep tub so I would be tall enough. I had done this before -- for Prim, mostly. My mother once or twice. But it felt different doing it for Peeta. More intimate, maybe. Only, I don’t like thinking about why that would be. 

  
I gathered it into a ponytail first and cut as evenly as I could across it, though I was really just sawing through the hair with the dull scissors. The hair fell to the floor and she was left with jagged, uneven hair that I brushed through with my fingers. Merchant hair, thinner than mine, strange under my fingers.    
  
“It -- might not be pretty,” I warned, as though I wasn’t about three minutes too late.    
  
“I don’t  _ want  _ to be pretty.” Her voice startled me, almost, with its intensity.    
  
My next cut was more sure. By the time I finished, her hair was a little shorter than it was those days in the cave, but cut a little more evenly than she could manage with her knife in the arena. The bathroom mirror was covered, too, but she lifted that sheet with a hesitant hand and brought the other one up to push the front bit of hair behind her ear. It fell away instantly and she laughed breathlessly. 

  
And then she was kissing me. I had only barely gotten onto my feet, and then there I was, already being crowded back against the clawfoot tub. Being kissed by my --    
  
Whatever Peeta was.    
  
And her new mouth, and this new way that she curled her body against mine while she kissed me, like she was trying to shield me from something. My knees hit the edge of the tub and I let myself go down onto it, hands ghosting against her back as I tried to decide whether she would disappear completely if I held onto her. She was practically sitting in my lap, one leg on either side of my waist, prosthetic leg in the tub behind me, one arm bracing herself against the wall.    
  
And then there was her other hand. Burns from years at the ovens smoothed away completely. Soft and smooth and almost entirely unnatural as it rested against the back of my neck and moved to cradle my face at the jaw.    
  
We had kissed before. Of course we had. In front of the whole country, in our cave, during the interviews and the recap and on stage at our homecoming, though the last few were different. They felt more chaste, somehow. Less personal, even though they seemed to go on forever.    
  
This wasn’t quite like any of them. She was desperate. Like she couldn’t get close enough to me.    
  
“No one else -- will even look at me,” she gasped out, half like she was choking. So I forced my eyes to open, to hold hers at least until they dropped away, though mine did catch for a moment on the almost purplish scabs near her wrist. I watch her even after her eyes close tightly enough to form creases in the perfect skin around them. “I didn’t think--” she started, and then cut herself off.    
  
And then she was sobbing. She pried herself off of me, though she nearly fell trying to get the prosthetic out of the tub, and as soon as she did, she crumpled against the floor and choked and gasped and somehow managed to both shrink away from and against me when I joined her.    
  


. . .    
  
“The bitch had it coming,” my sister says by way of greeting.    
  
I don’t bother lifting my head. I know her routine, when she gets in from a long shift like the one she had today. She stops just inside the door and pulls off the overshirt they make her wear, and drops it in the hamper she leaves over there. Her shoes come off next. I hear them find their place by the door.    
  


“She’ll never want to see me again,” I mutter from my spot on the sofa. I’m sure it’s muffled, with my knees pulled up to my chin. Where I want to be right now is my nest in the closet, but I made myself wait out here, just so I could hear any new developments from Prim when she got back in from work.    
  
I lift my head at this, but just a little.    
  
“She asked me if you were okay. I told her she’ll learn soon enough how tough you are, and not to worry.” 

 

She sits on the couch beside me, and my head sinks back down against my knees. Learn. Prim told her she would learn, not that she would remember.    
  
“She wanted to know if you would come in tomorrow.”    
  
“What did you tell her?” I mumble.    
  
Prim scoffs. “What do you think I told her?”    
  
. 

 

Peeta stares at me for a long moment before she speaks, jaw working like that’ll help her find the right words.    
  
“She shouldn’t have hit you.” 

 

“I shouldn’t have grabbed her hair,” I return mechanically.    
  
She watches me for a breath or two, head tilting to the side almost unconsciously. It’s not a tic I recognize from her. “You don’t believe that.” It’s not an accusation, exactly. More like an observation.    
  
“I don’t,” I admit.    
  
Her eyes drop to her lap. I can tell she’s trying to knit something, but her hands are shaking too badly.    
  
“How did you know she was going to hit me?”    
  
It’s wrong. Telling her this. But she must know, already, on some level. No one hits their child for the first time in front of a room full of doctors. “She’s done it before.”    
  
She nods jerkily. I take a few steps closer to the bed and see that whatever she’s cast on is a mess. Lopsided, with some tight stitches and a few purls. My stomach twists strangely as I realize how unlike this is from anything I’ve seen her make.    
  
“Everyone says I knew how,” she mutters, clearly noticing my eyes on the yarn. “I don’t buy it.”    
  
“You did.”    
  
A dry little scoff, at this. Not one she’s proud of.    
  
“You taught Prim,” I offer, though I’m not sure why. It’s not like that gets her eyes to light up, or anything. “My sister,” I say weakly, already half-expecting her to tell me that she knows who Prim is, that of  _ course  _ she knows who Prim is. 

 

Instead, she just nods, gaze a little vacant.    
  
“The nurse you liked,” I say.    
  
Another nod, at this.    
  
“She always wanted to learn, but my mother never had time to teach her. And me, I’m no good.”    
  
Those blue eyes flick up towards me, but they can barely hold mine.    
  
Everything in my body protests against it, but I pull the cowl over my head. My hands bunch in it even as I offer the piece to her. It’s beautifully knitted, with stitches that are raised and diagonal and three different shades of green yarn. I told her once, before the birthday she gave it to me, that it was her favorite color.    
  
“Um,” I manage. “You made this.”    
  
Weak as her grasp is, she still manages to ease the cowl from my hands. She frowns down at it, eyebrows drawn together. She clearly doesn’t recognize it. I smooth my hands over my thighs, trying to resist the urge to yank it away from her. I wasn’t allowed to wear it in District Thirteen, but it’s been around my neck ever since. Until now.    
  
She bites down on one of her lips, hard enough that the skin just below it it starts to pale.    
  
“For me,” I continue needlessly. “It was my birthday. And you . . . made it for me.”    
  
It was wrapped carefully, too, of course. As with anything she would ever give me. She painted the tag herself -- a tiny, intricate scene with woods and little yellow dotted dandelions on one side, and my name on the other in careful, even penmanship. With her hands shaking like this, I can’t imagine she’d be able to recreate any part of the gift. 

  
“You told me--” my voice breaks. I want to leave. But I can’t, not with her holding the cowl. And not with her looking like that. “You wanted to give me something to keep my face warm. I . . . um, I hunt.”    
  
It’s wrong. Explaining something like this to Peeta. Who knows -- who knew once, at least.    
  
“And I hate -- having stuff by my eyes. So you made me this, so I could have my hat down to my ears and the cowl up over my--” for some reason, I can’t keep explaining. Her fingers trail over the fabric.    
  
I kissed her, when she explained why she made this for me. I was glad that she had decided to give me my present outside, rather than in front of my mother and sister during my birthday dinner. Because she gave a little squeak of surprise and I ended up pushing her back completely against the front door and kissing her until we were late for the dinner celebration my sister planned.    
_  
_ And here I am. Thinking about kissing her when she’s -- like this. What I want, now, is to pull the cowl up over my face and hide. But she doesn’t seem to even want to give it back to me.    
  
“I have to go,” I announce.    
  
Peeta still doesn’t look up from the cowl in her hands. 


	2. To Love Me Like You Used To Do

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks to @jobanana7 for betaing!!

The Victory Tour was some of the worst of it. The Capitol loved their Victors, obviously -- the Star Crossed Lovers of the Quarter Quell. It was no secret, even just around District Twelve, how pretty Peeta was to begin with. And that was still there, sort of, even underneath the changes they made.    
  
They claimed that was the point. At least, in the interview with Caesar Flickerman just after we won, after I had taken her face in my hands there on the stage in front of everyone and whispered “What did they do to you?” and she covered it up with a kiss.   
  
She made some sort of charming joke to Caesar about getting used to her new face and the audience howled with laughter and I gripped her hand so tightly it even hurt mine while Caesar crowned about what a lucky girl she was and what all the girls all over the country would trade for the opportunity to have their faces  _ fixed _ .    
  
Fixed. As though it was wrong to begin with.    
  
  
So it only made sense that everything they dressed her in on the Tour was made to accentuate the work they put into her. They were trotting us around like show ponies, and it wasn’t like there was anything we could do about it.     
  
Peeta told me how pretty I looked nearly every night, but I could tell in the way her lips twitched after she said it that I wasn’t to return the compliment. She heard it enough, anyway. Every night at a different party, by some different government official or peacekeeper Always a man and always on the Capitol’s payroll. And Peeta would always smile and then find some excuse to lead me away with an arm around my lower back.    
  
It was to the dance floor, usually. But not the night we were in District Six. We were mingling in the Mayor’s mansion and some Peacekeeper asked to steal me away for a dance and she made some comment about needing to show me something. I don’t even know how she knew where the library was, but that was where she brought me.    
  
I was probably supposed to let go of her hand once we were safely inside. But I didn’t.    
  
And, of course, neither did she.    
  
  
  
“What were you going to show me?” I asked.    
  
She looked down at our joined hands and bit her lip before she spoke. “I just -- I knew the way he was looking at you. He put his hand on my thigh during dinner, and--”   
  
“You should have said something,” I said.    
  
“They’ve got my nails filled sharp enough,” she said. “I just dug them into his wrist.”    
  
And then it didn’t matter that it wasn’t dark, the dresses they made her wear didn’t matter. Or her newly-straightened nose or her wrong lips or the dead hair they attached to her scalp again as soon as her stylist found what I had done with my kitchen scissors and screamed at us both for being so reckless with the hair that cost more than I would have seen in my whole life if I hadn’t won the Games. Because it was still her. Only ever her, kind and funny and brave and willing to protect me -- protect us both -- from anything.    
  
“It’s probably safe to go back out now,” she murmured, eyes on our joined hands.    
  
“What if I don’t want to?” I asked, trailing my free hand up her wrist. She let out a shaky breath and said,     
  
“Do you think that’s really a good idea?”    
  
“I think we’re going to get the lecture for sneaking out either way,” I said.    
  
She arched her perfectly sculpted eyebrows at this. “Oh, you mean you don’t think Effie is going to love having to spin this?”    
  
I laughed. “Ten bucks says she’ll start in on us before we even get to the train.”    
  
“Oh, my odds of winning that one are awful,” she complained, bringing our hands up and kissing the inside of my wrist. My knees felt weak, for some reason, when she did. I almost wished her lipstick would stain my skin, but it didn’t budge.    
  
“You gotta be the one to make the bet next time,” I said, and though I was attempting to sound competitive, it came out all breathless instead.    
  
She smiled and brought my hand up to rest at her shoulder -- just like when we were dancing earlier. My other hand came up to place out of muscle memory and she smiled, hands coming to my waist.    
  
“I’m already dreading having to get used to sleeping alone again,” she admitted quietly.    
  
She was trying to joke, I could tell. But there was something else beneath it.    
  
“Like I don’t already live over at your house,” I said, and she snorted softly.    
  
“Yeah, now. But I’ve had you to myself long enough,” she said. “You’ll want to see your sister and your mother. And then you’ll realize how boring an empty house is.”    
  
I rested my forehead against the satin of her dress and felt her breath hitch a little. The neckline was high enough that I was barely even touching her. But it was different, being here alone, dancing like this.   
  
I lifted my head to find her staring at me, eyes so blue and so familiar, even under those thick eyelashes that never even needed the dark makeup they tried to hide them with.    
  
“God, Mellark,” she murmured. “Killing the mood.”    
  
“What mood?” I asked, and her eyes went all wide.    
  
“I just -- I meant--” I used my hands over her shoulders to drag her head down towards mine until her lips hovered just over mine. “You know,” she breathed.    
  
I crashed my lips against hers and she whimpered. I hadn’t kissed her like this since before the tour, and maybe she missed it as much as I did. We had been kissing in the meantime, of course, in front of all the cameras. But it was different. She didn’t gasp like this when we were kissing in front of Effie Trinket.     
  
She kissed me again. More, this time. She dragged me closer to her, grasp not tight or painful but more insistent. Then there were her legs, sort of inching between mine until I moved back on instinct. A book fell off the shelf when she backed me up against it, using her forearm to cushion me against the wood, but neither of us paid any attention to it. 

  
  
Effie Trinket didn’t wait until we were headed to the train to start lecturing us. She started as soon as she threw the door open and found us in the library.     
  
“What, exactly, are you two even  _ doing _ back here?” she demanded as I sprang away from Peeta. Peeta wrapped her arm around my waist.    
  
“She was reminding me how our big waltz goes.”    
  
Effie took in a deep breath, just like she was about to start to argue, Peeta continued.    
  
“It’s just hard, sometimes, with the new leg,” she continued. “I lose my balance and I just --” she wiped at an imaginary tear. “I’m sorry.”    
  
Effie tsk-tsk’d and said, “Oh, you poor thing,” and, “They’re waiting on you out there.”    
  
“Maybe Katniss and I can just run through it a couple more times.”    
  
I worked to school my features so I wasn’t openly gawking at her. She was brilliant -- and so, so bold.    
  
“Don’t push your luck, Miss Mellark,” Effie said. “Come come, back to the party.”    
  
I couldn’t help the breathless laugh that escaped me as soon as Effie turned away.    
  
Yes. This was, of course, the same Peeta.    
  
. . .    
  


  
Once we were safely back in my room, she helped me to unzip my gown -- as she always did. But though I wanted so badly for her hands to roam across my back, all I got was her hand ghosting against my back to uncatch some of the fabric from the metal tooth.    
  
“Can I do yours?” I asked, and she said something about needing to wash the makeup off her face. But then -- I was so desperate, and she was so close, earlier, that I couldn’t let her put a wall up between us again.    
  
“Wait,” I begged, even as I held my dress up against my chest. “Kiss me. Again, please.”    
  
The smile that split her face at this was somehow warm and shy and proud, all at once.    
  
“Gonna wash my face first,” she informed me, dropping a red-lipped kiss against the tip of my nose. “And then I’ll kiss you all you want.”    
  
  
Even though I couldn’t justify it, I didn’t want to let the door shut between us. She left it cracked open and once I had changed -- into one of her favorite tee shirts, a white one with a red collar, and a pair of pajama shorts -- I crept in behind her. She saw me in the mirror right away and offered me another one of those smiles, white soap lathered all against her face. 

 

“Hey,” she smiled. “Here.”    
  
She passed me the little pump of face wash, which I hadn’t actually used before. Usually, I just stand under the water in the shower and scrub off whatever runs down my face with a towel. When I filled my palm with the stuff, she laughed and said,    
  
“Wait, not that much.”    
  
“I don’t know how to--”    
  
“Let me.”    
  
She wet the corner of a washcloth and took some of the lather from my hand. My eyelids fluttered shut when her other hand came to rest -- very, very gently -- on my jaw to hold me in place.    
  
“I think you get it even worse than I do,” she murmured. “Come here, closer to the sink.”    
  
I flicked the excess soap from my hoisted myself up onto the bathroom counter and she laughed. The hand that had been on my jaw dropped and rested briefly on my exposed thigh, and I could feel the warmth of her all the way up to my face.    
  
“They couldn’t make you any paler if they tried, I don’t think,” she said, annoyance creeping into her voice even with her touch as gentle as it was.    
  
“Takes them hours,” I said. She laughed humorlessly as she applied the faintest bit of pressure over one of my eyebrows. 

 

“I’ll bet it does.” 

  
She leaned in beside me to rinse the soap from her face and grabbed a decorative towel from where it hung off the cabinet. “I gotta get out of this dress,” she said as she dried her face. “You should be fine to wash that off whenever.” 

  
  
When I emerged, face warm and tight from the hot water, she had changed into a loose black shirt and a pair of flannel pajama pants. She was putting my dress on a hanger from where I had left it heaped on the floor. 

 

“Hey,” I said.    
  
“Hey,” she echoed, another smile curving her lips. “Look at you, huh? So much prettier this way.”    
  
My face burned sharp and hot. “And she’s funny, too,” I said, my hand coming up instinctively to the scarf I had wrapped my braids up in for the night.    
  
“I’m not kidding.”    
  
Oh. She flashed me an impossibly endearing grin at this before she turned to hang the dresses in the closet. She had braided her hair back in a several stranded style I recognized from some of the other Town girls. From behind, I could almost forget they had done anything to her.    
  
“Hey, Katniss?” she asked. “I think someone mentioned something about a kiss, earlier.”    
  
I laughed.     
  
  
Peeta kissed me all desperate and eager -- it was something we had done before. Even recently. Her hands held onto my hips, warm and firm but so gentle. And then she did this thing where she broke away for a half a second and just exploded into a dozen smaller kisses.    
  
I was laughing from that when she started to do that same half-crowding half-leading thing from earlier. I laughed “Wait, wait, I’m gonna fall.”    
  
“You’re not gonna fall,” she said. And then -- “Trust me.”    
  
And I did. Of course I did. My legs didn’t give out until I was right up against the mattress. Another laugh escaped me, and I was thinking about how you probably weren’t supposed to laugh this much when you were kissing.    
  
She balanced herself on the side without the prosthetic and framed my face with her forearms. “See?” she asked, breathless. “Like I was gonna let you fall.”    
  
“I just -- since you--” I stammered, fingers tangling into her newly-long hair, disrupting her braid. She dropped her lips from my mouth to my neck. It was heady, the smell of her shampoo, the feeling of the kiss she pressed against my skin. My gasp only seemed to spur her on.    
  
Maybe, had I been thinking more clearly, I would have thought about how vulnerable I made myself, tilting my head back like that to allow her more access to my throat. Only, there was no real threat. Not from her, not ever. And it wasn’t like Peeta was using her teeth anyway.    
  
I started a few sentences while the kisses trailed down to my collarbone, but nothing that got past, “Oh,” or “I--” or “You . . .” or “Peeta.”    
  
On the last one, I could  _ feel  _ her smile against the skin at the hollow of my throat. I forced my fingers to relax some, though I wasn’t sure she’d even have minded it if I did manage to pull out those fancy extensions. Something low in my stomach felt desperate -- hot and sharp, but not bad, by any stretch.    
  
“Can I--?” her breath was warm and damp against my skin, and I found myself nodding before she even finished with whatever she was going to ask, which made her laugh. The sound of it was rich and warm and it felt so welcome and strange against my skin. “You don’t know what I was going to ask.”    
  
“I don’t think I care,” I admitted, my hand coming to the back of her neck. She shivered at the touch. The longer she stayed like this, the more vulnerable I began to feel.    
  
“I want to try something, but it might leave a mark,” she warned, a little quieter now. “It wouldn’t hurt. Just--”    
  
“Yes.”    
  
“Are you--?”    
  
“Do it,” I insisted. “Let them see. I don’t care.”    
  
No. This wasn’t quite the right thing to say. She pressed a feather-light kiss against my collarbone instead and said,    
  
“Maybe this wasn’t my best idea.”    
  
“I just -- I meant--” I stumbled, even as she straightened up. She didn’t look upset, exactly, but she looked distant in a way I couldn’t handle, and I had a hard time finding the right words on a normal day. “Peeta.”    
  
She studied me for a moment. 

 

“It’s not for them,” she said at last, blue eyes burning. Intense but not angry. At least, not angry at me. “It’s not  _ theirs _ , Katniss. They don’t get to-”    
  
I kissed her to interrupt her, before she kept saying things that were true. Something that could get us both killed before the train docked in the next district.    
  
“You’re right,” I said against her lips, quiet and desperate. “I meant --I was thinking about Effie, and--”     
  
She laughs at this, quiet and unbelieving, but not angry or bitter. “So I’m kissing you and you’re thinking about Effie Trinket--”    
  
“I’m  _ not _ !” I protested. “I meant--”    
  
“No, it’s okay,” she teased, and I could feel her smile, though it wasn’t the same as that open mouthed one against my throat earlier. “I’ll get an orange wig. It’s good for me to learn what gets you--”    
  
“Stop! Stop!” I laughed, falling back a little against the bed again and anchoring my hands around her neck, towards her back, to take her down with me. “That’s not what I meant and you know it.” 

 

She laughed. “All I know is that--” 

 

I strained up to kiss her again, past the point of caring where that joke was supposed to end. So she settled in, heavier on the side with her good leg. She kissed me breathless all over again, but I still worried that I needed to explain myself when she broke for air.    
  
“I was just . . . saying I would tell--  _ fuck _ .”     
  
She was kissing my throat again. “No, go on,” she prompted when my sentence died off. “Though I do like it when you say fuck.” She whispered that part, the warm air ghosting over my throat, and my entire body shuddered. This gets a little laugh out of her, but not exactly like it was funny. Then I felt the inside of her bottom lip drag against my throat and something deep in my gut twisted, hot and sharp.    
  
“You were saying?” she asked, right up against my skin.    
  
“I -- um,” I tried, unable to focus. “Huh?”    
  
Now she really did think it was funny.    
  
“Are you--?”    
  
My question died on my lips as she -- softly, and with almost no real suction, took some of the skin of my throat into her mouth. Oh. The noise that escaped me was half groan and half sigh. My fingers threaded into her hair again even despite my protesting from earlier.     
  
Her hand came down to touch my waist again, different with me laying down, where my shirt -- her shirt -- had ridden up, and her fingers just ghosted over the skin. My stomach jumped at the contact and she smiled again, still against my skin.    
  
“You’re making fun of me,” I managed to grit out after a moment, though there was no real anger in my voice. But then her mouth separated from my skin with a soft pop and I continued to pull at her head, hoping that she would kiss me again. 

 

“No _ ,”  _ she said firmly. “ _ No _ . I would never.”    
  
I wanted to say something clever, but then she lifted her head. She looked disheveled -- lips a little swollen, face flushed. And completely honest. Which made it even stranger when she said,    
  
“I’m just happy.”    
  
Happy.    
  
“You have no idea how long I’ve wanted . . .” she started, but then she trailed off, biting her lip. “Stupid,” she breathed. “I should shut up.”    
  
“I never said that,” I said.    
  
She inched the shirt up a little, exposing more flesh for those gentle, tracing fingertips. I tilted my hips up towards her to try to encourage her to push at the shirt even more  and she let out a long, almost unsteady breath that danced across my polished skin.    
  


She had the shirt pushed all the way up to my ribcage. And she was staring at me, entirely unabashed. The heat in my stomach doubled, tripled, at the sight of the look in her eyes.    
  
“You are so fucking gorgeous.”    
  


I jerked again, this time threading my fingers into the sheets beneath me because I needed to hold onto  _ something _ .    
  
“What would you say if I asked to make you feel good?”    
  
“This . . . does feel nice,” I breathed out, trying to keep my composure as her fingertips trailed along my skin.    
  
“I didn’t say  _ nice _ ,” she corrected softly.And then, lightning fast, she pressed a wet kiss against my hip bone, just above the sleeping shorts.    
  
I cried out and slapped my palm over my mouth a moment too late. Peeta grinned up at me, all cocky, and I wanted to get her back even though I couldn’t explain why. So I pushed myself up and tugged the shirt off. It landed against her chest when I lobbed it at her and fell to the bed without her so much as sparing a glance at it.    
  
I was aware, suddenly, of my lack of camisole or bra, or whatever else I could have used to cover my chest. It took all I had in me not to snatch it back up or cover myself with a pillow or something. But then Peeta said,    
  
“Fuck. Is that a yes?”    
  
“Yes. Please.” I choked.    
  


She didn’t touch anything new. Stayed with her hands at my waist and my hips, chivalrous as usual.    
  
“Up here,” I insisted, using my hand in her hair to drag her back up to my mouth. “Please,” I breathed again. “Please.”    
  
She laughed again and then whimpered when I took her bottom lip between mine. It was something she had done to me a few times before, something that always sends gooseflesh up and down my arms. This time, it resulted in an almighty shudder, and I almost thought that she was going to collapse on top of me.    
  
And I wanted her to. I wanted all of her weight on me, though I couldn’t place why. I just kept clawing at her back. She fell forward, just barely, and when she caught herself, her knee nudged between my thighs and my head fell back.    
  
“Oh.”    
  
“Is that a good oh?” she asked, leg creeping back just a little. She would disappear entirely if I asked her to, I’m sure. My hips ground down, desperate not to lost the friction.    
  
“Yes, good. Stay. Stay here, I-- Need. I want . . .” I babbled. She kissed sloppily in the hollow just behind my ear, moving her leg a little further up, and I nearly convulsed.    
  
“Tell me what you want,” she said, all hoarse and quiet. “I’ll do it. Just ask. Please.”    
  
“You can touch. Can you? Please? I --”    
  
Her hands skimmed up my waist to my chest and I bit my bottom lip hard to keep from making any more embarrassing noises.    
  
“Hey,” she said. “Hey. How about that’s my job?”    
  
I had barely let go of my lip to ask her what she meant before she took it between hers, biting it just slightly. The backs of her nails brushed across my breasts and I tried not to shudder so hard that she took my lip clean off on accident.    
  
“Would it be okay if I kissed your--”    
  
“Please. Peeta -- I --  _ fuck _ .”    
  
She laughed, already at work kissing her way down my throat.    
  
“And -- and touch--” my face felt so hot even just trying to say it. So I didn’t. Instead, I just grabbed her wrist and dragged me to the spot between my thighs where the ache was the worst. “If you want to.”    
  
“If I  _ want  _ to?” she echoed incredulously. “Katniss.”    
  
“I meant -- I --  _ Oh! _ ”    
  
“I have always wanted to,” she assured me, deftly untying the drawstring on my pajama shorts. “This okay?”    
  
I babbled something in the affirmative and she laughed.    
  
“You make the prettiest fucking noises.”    
  
  
It wasn’t until after that I even thought to offer. She laughed, propping herself up on one shoulder to look over at me.    
  
“I feel bad,” I admitted, still a little breathless. “I mean. You -- for me. Twice. And -- I should--”    
  
“Are you kidding me?” she asked. “I got Katniss Everdeen off  _ twice _ . You think that’s not enough to keep me happy for the rest of my natural life?”    
  
I buried my face in the pillow. As if I had any right to feel shame now.    
  
It was later, when I was almost asleep, when she said,    
  
“It’s not -- my body.”    
  
My eyes fluttered back open. “You’re still you,” I said, drowsy but insistent. “No one else would have been so happy to -- to . . .”    
  
“Give you an orgasm?” she laughed. “I’d beg to differ on that one.”    
  
Ugh. Why did she have so many names for it?    
  
“I know I’m still me,” she said. “But -- I don’t . . . want this body to be the first one you touch.”    
  
I swallowed thickly. “Okay,” I lied.    
  
“No, it’s not,” she said, kissing my forehead. “But it’s gotta be.”    
  
“Okay,” I lied again.    
  
. . .    
  
“And you like it out there?”    
  
Prim thinks she’s being discreet, curled around the phone like she is. Like I don’t know the only person she speaks to this way. Like it’s a secret.    
  
“I’m working on it,” she says, stirring at whatever her pot on the stove is. “I know.”    
  
And then, a little quieter,    
  
“Really? I mean --you do?”    
  
A breathless little laugh at this.    
  
“No, I mean, yeah. Of course.”    
  
I clear my throat and she startles. 

 

“Okay. Sure, Mom. I’ve gotta go, okay? Love you, bye.”    
  
“Don’t hang up on my account,” I say, though I’m a moment too late. Prim offers me a tight smile.    
  
“Who says it’s on your account? Are you hungry?”    
  
When I don’t answer, she frowns and rephrases.    
  
“When did you last eat?”    
  
“I . . . a while ago,” I admitted.    
  
“Sit,” she insists, and I do, but just to save myself the lecture about what a big day I had. “Did you see her again?”    
  
“Yes.” I say. “Well, sort of.”    
  
  
Peeta was having a bad day. Her doctors informed me that this happens often, and especially when she’s been introduced to something that stimulates the bits of her memory that were removed during the Enhancement. I knew without asking that it had to do with the Cowl, which she had pulled almost all the way up to her eyes when I arrived at her room.    
  
All she said was, “I don’t want to talk.”    
  
And then, about ten minutes later,    
  
“You don’t have to leave, though.”    
  
  
Prim, dutiful as she is, and surely already informed from the other nurses, doesn’t press me to share any more.    
  
“Mom says hi.”    
  
“I bet she does.”    
  
A scoff from Prim. “What’s that supposed to mean?”    
  
“Nothing, duck,” I say. “I’m just tired.”    
  
“She does love you, you know.”    
  
“Yeah. Enough to--”    
  
“Katniss.”    
  
I hold a hand up in surrender. It’s not worth fighting with her about this, anyway. She doesn’t remember what it was like, needing our mother and not having her there. And though she won’t say it, I suspect that what she does remember is needing me, when I was reaped, and not having me there.    
  
Still, she’s here, with me. So maybe I ought to just take what I can get.    
  
. . .    
  
I arrive in Peeta’s room before breakfast the next morning. I let myself in, and she doesn’t seem even to notice the door opening, she’s so transfixed by what they’re projecting on the far wall.    
  
“You would have found me if you could,” I was saying on the screen. It was us -- during the Games, in our cave. She was so sick. Even clearer now, on the screen, than it was in my panic during the Games.    
  
“Yes. Look, if I don’t make it back--”    
  
“Don’t talk like that. I didn’t drain all that pus for nothing.”    
  
“I know. But just in case I don’t--” she tried to continue, but I put my fingers on her lips to quiet her.    
  
“No, Peeta. I don’t even want to discuss it.”    
  
“But I--”    
  
It feels like a million years ago. Me kissing her for the first time. It had been so impulsive, and all the ways I’ve seen it edited before have had this romantic, swelling music under it. Not this time, though.    
  
Is this just the raw footage, then? One of the thousands of vantage points in the arena?    
  
And then it jumps back, past my disastrous attempt at rolling her into the river to me calling her name out in the three that night. 

 

“They make you watch this?” I ask, incredulous, and she jumps. I didn’t realize until she muted it that she was the one with the controls. 

  
“They don’t make me do much of anything,” she returns, almost no inflection in her voice at all. “You’re here early.”    
  
“Yeah,” I say. “That okay?”    
  
A laugh. “Do I get a say?”    
  
My fists ball uselessly at my sides. “Obviously,” I say, unable to keep the edge out of my voice. “Should I--? Do you want me to get them to turn this off?”    
  
“When I had to argue so much to turn it on in the first place?” she asks.    
  
It’s quiet for a moment, save for the onscreen version of myself trying to nurse her back to health by the river. 

  
“I’ll just go, then.”    
  
I wait, though I don’t know what for. For her to protest or ask me to stay or  _ something _ . Instead, just as I’m almost to the door, she says flatly,    
  
“Yeah. This is hard for you, I’m sure.” 

  
“Don’t be a dick, Peeta,” I snap, though I regret it instantly. “I just -- I mean, I’m on your side.”    
  
She snorts. “And I’m supposed to just be able to put it together from there, huh?”    
  
Oh. That’s fair, at least, but that doesn’t mean I hate it any less. “Then you could start by asking.”    
  
“Asking you  _ what _ ?” she asks, incredulous. “Because -- because look at that.  _ Look _ ,” she stresses, pausing the screen on a frame where she’s just . . . staring up at me. The way she used to look at me all the time.    
  
“Yeah.” I say. “I’m looking.”    
  
“I was -- I must have --” she fumbles, and then collects herself and says, “I was looking at you like  _ that _ , and --- Now I look at you and it’s . . .”    
  
“What?” I croak, though I know I shouldn’t ask.    
  
“It’s nothing.”    
  
“No, tell me.”    
  
She laughs, though it’s humorless. “No, Katniss. That’s what I’m saying. I’m -- I look at you, and it’s just . . . nothing. There’s not -- anything even to be confused about.”    
  
I’m back in the hallway before she says my name. But I can’t turn around. Not with this sharp, awful pain in my chest, or my hand over my mouth or --    
  
Or the awful, choking noise that’s rising from somewhere in my stomach.    
  
. . .    
  


The morning before we docked in District Five, I woke with the soft, thin sheets just barely over my chest. Peeta was awake, too, propped up on one shoulder. She smiled softly when she noticed I was awake, and I flushed with the memory of the night before and adjusted the sheets just a little further. 

 

“Effie came knocking earlier,” she informed me. “I guess she checked my room and was just scandalized not to find me there.”    
  
I laughed through my nose and her smile grew even more endeared, bottom corners pulling down just a little.    
  
“I hope you won’t mind that I told her you weren’t feeling so well.”    
  
“You did? You’re my hero.”    
  
She laughed. “It’s just a travel day. She had some lectures about etiquette, I’m sure, but I told her I’d be in here with you. Taking care of you.”    
  
“Taking care of me?” I echoed, feeling that same pinch low in my gut from the night before. 

 

She gave me that cocky grin again. “If you’d like,” she said, reaching over to nudge at my shoulder. My skin prickled with gooseflesh at the contact and she laughed. “Would you?”    
  
“Should brush my teeth first,” I said, and she beamed, falling onto her back. 

 

I took the sheets with me when I went to the joined bathroom. Like that wasn’t silly. Like she hadn’t already seen me. She didn’t laugh, though. Just as she promised the night before. 

 

“We don’t have to get right into it,” she informed me when I returned to the bed. “I thought I might grab you some breakfast. Or--”    
  
I didn’t bother waiting on her to come to me. Instead, I climbed onto the bed and positioned my legs just wide enough for me to hover over her. Her hand came up -- trembling, I noticed, which seemed a little funny, since I had thought she seemed so certain last night -- and rested on my lower back. She didn’t push, but she did guide me down and groan a little, at either my weight on her or the sheet, which had come untucked between us falling away entirely.    
  
“Okay, breakfast later,” she said on an exhale.    
  
I smiled, tipping my forehead against hers.    
  


“Please,” she breathed, and I relished the power I had. “Katniss. Please?”    
  
So I kissed her, and she gasped and groaned against my mouth when I did. Like she was so desperate, this whole time. Even though we had done this less than eight hours before. Like she always would be desperate.    
  
“Effie’s gonna kill us,” I mumbled, and she used my distraction to flip me flat onto my back.    
  
“Thinking about Effie again,” she pointed out, dragging her lips down my throat.    
  
“Just -- when she finds out--”    
  
“Who says she’s gonna find out?” she asked. “I’m pretty sure I could keep us entertained in here all day. And then we’ll claim it was just some twenty-four hour thing.”    
  
“All day?” I challenged, back arching a little as her lips reached the underside of my breast. “That sounds--  _ fu-- _ ambitious.” I caught myself, though just barely, and she said,    
  
“Well, you know.”    
  
“What do I know?” I sight up at the ceiling, almost too far gone to keep up with what she was saying.    
  
“You know me,” she joked. “And you know how I can, ah, spend all day working at something I really want to be good at.”    
  
“ _ Want _ to be good at?” I tried to make it clear the thought was ridiculous -- that she  _ was  _ good at it, as evidenced by the night before. Instead I just sounded confused.    
  
“Wanna be so good at it,” she assured me, breath warm against the skin of my stomach. “Can I try something new?”    
  
I meant to tell her that it was all new, for some of us. But then she kissed my hip bone again, just like the night before, and hit me what she meant, and I went ahead and covered my mouth with the cook of my arm preemptively once she was sure I had said yes. 

 

  
After, when I was trying to catch my breath, she came up to lay beside me again, licked her lips and said,    
  
“You know, they want me to propose to you. Once we get to the Capitol.”    
  
. . .    
  
“She wants to see you,” Prim informs me loudly, as soon as she’s in our quarters. I can tell I’m in the shit if she’s not bothering to come find where I’ve hidden myself in my closet, let alone greet me or ask me if I’ve eaten. Whatever she heard from Peeta, she’s angry. And while she probably ought to be, I can’t help but feel irritated.    
  
Was it not enough, Peeta Mellark telling me I was nothing to her? She had to make my sister hate me for it as well?    
  
“I don’t want to see her,” I say back, probably not loudly enough to be heard. They had warned me of as much already -- that she would be different. Maybe unrecognizable. But cruelty wasn’t anything I had ever imagined with conjunction to Peeta.    
  
“Katniss?”    
  
I tug my knees up to my chin. But then I hear it. 

  
“She’s in here, I bet.”    
  
I scramble to my feet at this, trying to work out who I might have to interact with in the next few moments. And then the door whirrs open and while Prim seems unsurprised by the sight of me, Peeta Mellark is looking at me like I’m a wild animal. 


	3. On The Day That I Forget You (i hope my heart explodes)

“What do you want?” I spit, pushing past my sister and her apparent visitor where they’ve clumped around my closet door. “I heard you before, all right? I get it. You don’t love me anymore, and you don’t remember why you were supposed to, and --” my voice is rising, now, and I don’t want her to hear me get all hysteric, so I stop myself and grab a sweater out of my dresser door. “You didn’t have to come all the way up here just to--”    
  
“I didn’t,” she interrupts, a hand coming up to scratch at the back of her neck. Now that she isn’t under the fluorescents, her hair doesn’t look quite as short. She doesn’t look quite as small, either. ”That’s not why I’m here.” 

  
“Oh.”    
  


I force my eyes away from her and shove my arms into my sleeves, not realizing until the fabric bags around me that it’s one of her sweaters. She doesn’t recognize it, at least. My relief at that is short-lived. Of course, she doesn’t recognize it. She barely recognizes me. I sit on the end of my bed and grab at my boots, not realizing until I’m already shoving them onto my feet that I’m not even wearing socks.    
  
“Then fine,” I say. “Whatever.” 

 

“Katniss,” Prim says, her voice all warning, like it’s wrong. Me not wanting to just sit here and chat with her like we’re old friends. Though we are, technically. Even if she does think I’m nothing. 

 

“No, really,” I say. “It’s fine.” 

 

“You should at least hear her out,” Prim says, and a dry, bitter laugh rips out of me. 

 

“Yeah, sure,” I say. “Fine. So she can tell me all about how I don’t mean anything to her. How I -- I’m  _ nothing _ , and--” I’m on my feet, now. “I have to go.”    
  
“She just said she’s not here because of that!” Prim argues. “Can you stop? Just -- two seconds. You  _ know  _ what she’s going through. Let her--”    
  
“Please stop talking about me like I’m not here,” Peeta says, and though she’s a little shaky, she certainly doesn’t sound unkind. Or even as detached as she did earlier today.    
  
Of course, she would still feel affection for Prim. That’s the difference, isn’t it? One of us deserves it and the other doesn’t. I’m just not used to Peeta seeing me as I am. 

 

I can feel my nostrils flaring. I work on relaxing them as I double knot my boots. “Out with it., then, if you want to talk.”     
  
She nods. “Right. Yeah. I -- I know I’m in no position to be asking you for any favors. And -- I’m sorry. About this morning. And about everything. I wish it wasn’t like this. For your sake.”    
  
For my sake. Another indignant laugh rises up in me and she bites her bottom lip, all guilty. Suddenly, I can’t take it.    
  
“I have to go,” I inform her.    
  
“Wait,” she pleads, looking over at Prim, like she can help. “Please. I just --”    
  
Prim puts herself a little closer to the doorway. I want to think it’s funny, but she’s right. I won’t shove past her just now.    
  
“Prim,” I warn, and my sister just crosses her arms. “I need--”    
  
“My mother didn’t leave,” Peeta gets out finally. “And they won’t let her in to see me in the hospital, but -- she’s just there. Outside. And -- they won’t give me a room by myself yet. But, uh, I just--” she scratches at her short hair again. “I shouldn’t have come here. I just couldn’t stand being watched. I’m sorry.”    
  
“Fine.”    
  
“I don’t--”    
  
“Stay here,” I grit out, because Prim would never forgive me if I said no. “I don’t care.”    
  
Prim clears her throat, and I swallow back my rising panic. 

 

“I mean -- I don’t mind. It’s fine. I just--” I can’t keep trying. “It’s fine. Whatever. I need to go get air. Just -- let me--”     
  
My sister gets out of the way, at least. Though I can tell there’s something in the way she stares at me as I go. She’ll certainly have something to say later. 

 

. . . 

It was one of the first truly nice days after the heat of our second summer mentoring the Games burnt off. We had settled into a routine, the two of us. By this point, it was unquestioned if not exactly liked by my mother that I lived in Peeta’s victor’s dwelling. After the Victory Tour, I tried to spend a few nights in the house that was technically mine, but they all ended with me using my key to let myself into her big, empty house. 

 

Besides. There was more privacy that way. Even that long after her hands first started to wander, she still didn’t seem to have any interest in keeping them off of me. Another part of the easy routine we had built. Sundays were different -- we were both busy. It wasn’t uncommon at all for us not to see each other at all until one of us climbed into bed after the other. So I didn’t expect her to be home at all when I got home from my afternoon in the woods. 

 

I hardly even waited until I was through the doorway before I stripped off my sweat-damp tee shirt. I patted at my chest with the wadded up material. While it wasn’t as hot as it had been just a few days earlier, but my hike had been long and I had been booking it to get home to the air conditioning. I tossed the shirt into the hamper on my way past the laundry room into the kitchen.    
  
I hiked my heavy game bag up to put it on the counter and, for once, startled at the sight of her. She was completely lost in her work -- fussing over a two-tiered cake, arranging fondant flowers so that it looked like they were spilling up and out of a basket she made out of thick frosting. I had seen her like this before, though not often. She would get so caught up in whatever she was making that she would forget to eat, forget to sleep. She had been up so late baking last night that she had still been up to make breakfast for me and pack up the leftovers before I left for the woods this morning.    
  
“Is this why you were so interested in my wildflowers?” I asked, and it was like she remembered to breathe when she stopped to look up at me.    
  
Her grin was one of my favorites of hers. Genuine and as warm as the sun outside. “I was sort of under the impression that they were my wildflowers,” she said, reaching for a mug and screwing her face up when she sipped it. “Yeah, that’s real cold.”    
  
I laughed. “You want more coffee? I was about to make some anyway.”     
  
“Please,” she said. And then slipped her bottom lip between her teeth and adjusted some of the sprigs of lavender before she said, “That’s a good look, by the way.”    
  
I nearly dropped her mug when I tried to cover my chest. I had forgotten entirely about my state of undress. She laughed. 

 

“No, really,” she said. “Distracting, even.”    
  
“Hey. I’m making you coffee. Don’t push it,” I warned.    
  
“Who’s pushing?” she asked. “I’m being serious. If I wasn’t so busy . . .”    
  
She let it hang and my stomach burned hot.

 

“Um,” I managed, turning on the coffee pot. “I -- um.”    
  
She laughed, but not like she was making fun of me. “Tonight?” she asked softly. “I might be out late. But, you know, I’ll be thinking about it.”    
  


I glanced over at her while the coffee machine bubbled. She was a little red, but she looked proud of herself. The way she always did when she knew she was working me up. “And I’m supposed to be able to focus on cleaning my game, now that you’ve got that in my head?”    
  
She laughed. “Maybe you come with me, then?” she asked. “Maybe we find a place to sneak off to.”    
  
There was no mistaking where she was going. Not in the gauzy white button-down shirt that I could tell without touching was light and coarse and the high waisted grey pants that you could almost mistake as something from Town if they didn’t fit her so well.    
  
“You wanna take me to a merchant wedding?” I asked, incredulous, and she grinned.    
  
“I wanna take you everywhere,” she informed me, freckled face scrunching a little with her smile. “But my best friend’s wedding is a start, yeah.”    
  
“Um,” I began. “I have a bunch of game.”    
  
Her face fell, but she caught it quickly and plastered a smile I recognized from the Capitol onto her face. “Yeah. Of course. No, I know you’re busy on Sundays.”    
  
I rinsed out her mug and refilled it with the hot coffee, pouring not quite as much cream into hers as I like in mine before I brought it back over to her. She whispered a  _ thank you _ but didn’t look up from the cake again.    
  
“I just mean,” I lied, “I don’t know -- how merchant toastings are. Delly likes rabbit though, right?”    
  
She looked up at me, grin spreading slow across her face. “You mean that?”    
  
No. “Yes,” I said. “If you’re sure.”    
  
“Yes.  _ Yes _ . Of course I am,” she said, and though I felt ridiculous, I dropped a kiss on her forehead on my way past her to the porch to skin what was now, apparently, a toasting gift. 

 

It wasn’t my standard, when I gave game to merchants. Usually, I just gave them away as they were when I shot them, but Peeta loved Delly so much that I knew I should be kinder, so I shoved the rest of my game back into the icebox and took my time skinning the rabbits. 

  
After my relatively quick shower, I let myself into Peeta’s closet. I didn’t have any of my mother’s old merchant dresses, since Prim had grown into them and I couldn’t deny her anything. I picked a yellow thing that I hadn’t actually ever seen her in. The only thing that really gave it away as having been from before the games was that it had been mended under the arm. I couldn’t do anything quite as intricate as my mother or sister, but I managed to braid my hair all the way around my head. 

 

I came downstairs to find Peeta with her head on her arms, cake boxed away in front of her. She wasn’t asleep but looked close. 

 

“You should rest,” I informed her, and she blinked at me, a warm smile spreading across her lips when she placed where my dress was from. “I’ll wake you when it’s time to leave,” I promised.    
  
“Bread isn’t done yet,” she protested. 

 

“I think I can figure out how to get it out of the oven once the timer goes off,” I joked, and she smiled, eyelids pulling shut as if of their own accord.    
  
“No,” I said, voice firm enough that she cracked them open. “Real bed. Come on.”    
She grumbled something I didn’t quite catch but complied when I continued to stare her down, reminding me when the oven was going to go off and when we should leave. I felt this awful affection for her begin to consume me and said,    
  
“Come on, before I change my mind.”    
  
. . . 

 

My sister must have told here where I was. Unless she’s secretly been coming up to the roof on the nights I haven’t. I don’t bother looking up from where I’ve leaned forward over the railing. It couldn’t be anyone else, not with those footsteps. 

 

“You’re not afraid of heights, then,” she says, attempting something more conversational than I’ve heard from her in nearly a year, now. “I’ll add it to the list of things I know about you.”    
  
I don’t respond. Don’t have anything I can say when she’s trying to make me laugh, or whatever. 

 

“Prim wanted me to tell you that dinner is almost ready,” she continues, somehow undeterred. “And -- um -- I wanted to tell you that I’ll leave if you want me to.”    
  
“Who said I want you to leave?” I ask. 

 

She laughs, though there’s no humor in it. “Who said you want me to stay?” she asks. “Look, Katniss, they would have had to take away a whole lot more than just my memories to make me stupid enough not to see how much you hate me.”    
  
“I don’t hate you,” I respond, and it’s automatic, even with the pain somewhere near my heart at the idea of her thinking I did. 

 

“You can’t even look at me,” she snaps. And then, softer, she says, “Fine. Maybe not hate. But you resent me.”    
  
I don’t try arguing this, and she continues. 

 

“I wish it was her here instead of me, too,” she continues. “But we both have to just--”    
  
“ _ Her _ ,” I repeat, and I don’t mean to sound so scathing, but I do. “What? Like you used to be some whole other person?”    
  
“Didn’t I?” she asks.    
  
It’s quiet for a moment. 

 

“The doctors told me that they have no optimism that I’ll recover anything further than what I have,” she continues. “But it’s like -- sometimes I can imagine what she’d think. Of me. How angry she would be that I just -- can’t seem to stop hurting you.”    
  
I rest my head on the back of my hands, where they sit on the railing of the roof and try to gather my thoughts. But I can’t. Not with her standing there like that. 

 

“I shouldn’t have told Prim,” she says. “I was just -- talking about how much I hate being watched. How they won’t release me if I’m going to be alone. And she’s so persuasive.”    
  
She’s right about that. Prim manages to get her way on about everything she wants. “I already told you it’s fine.”    
  
“And I already told you I’m not stupid,” she returns. “Look. I should just--” 

 

“Prim will kill me if you leave,” I say. “She’ll say it was my fault and she won’t forgive me.”  
  
“She would forgive you.”    
  
“No, she wouldn’t.” I finally lift my head. “I know you think you guys are best friends, or whatever, but she’s  _ my  _ sister.”    
  
It's quiet for a moment. And then, “Keep going.”    
  
I scoff, disbelieving.    
  
“I’m serious.” Peeta inches a little closer to me. It’s still a wide berth, but she does seem earnest. “Keep going.”    
  
“You can’t just  _ be _ someone else,” I add, the same note of hysteria from before creeping back into my voice. “You can’t -- have your voice and your eyes and be-- a total fucking stranger.”    
  
“That’s not the best you can do,” she accuses, though softly. “You’re going easy on me. You feel bad for me, because my head got all scrambled. But you didn’t seem to pity me before.”    
  
“I don’t pity you.”    
  
“Please,” she says. “I’ve seen enough footage, Katniss. I know you’re not usually so timid.”    
  
“I’m going easy on you because I was in love with you. Can you fucking--?” I cut myself off when I realize what I’ve just said. The first confession of its sort, given to someone who even admits to not being the same person. How many times has she said it to me? It feels like a whole lifetime ago, now. 

 

“That’s what they all say,” she says, sounding detached. “Just another piece of information to try and put you together with. Not scared of heights. Can’t even look at me. Loved me, once. Probably not as much as I loved her.”    
  
“That’s not true,” I snap, and then bite down hard on my lower lip so I can’t keep talking. 

 

“Maybe. Not like there’s anyone I can ask,” she continues. “Haymitch came around at first, a time or two. But I think my mother would have chased him off even if he was sober. And your sister. But somehow I think she didn’t know much about our relationship.”    
  
It’s quiet for a beat. 

 

“I’ll tell Prim this isn’t going to work,” she says flatly. .

 

“Ask me, then.”    
  
It’s not a favor I want to offer. Or one that I feel even remotely confident I can fulfill, but it’s the one that gets her to stop. 

 

“We came up here before.” 

 

“That’s not a question.”    
  
“But we came up here before,” she says again, and then before I can call it on her, she adds, “Is that real or not real?”    
  
Fine. “Real,” I say. “Whenever they lugged us out here we’d sneak up here.”    
  
“I remember--” she begins, and then cuts herself off. “I thought it was a dream. Didn’t recognize where it was until tonight. Your head in my lap. You made me a flower crown.”    
  
I looked over at her finally, but I couldn’t read what she thinking. “I made you a lot of flower crowns,” I admit, not able to speak loudly because it seems so embarrassing now. 

 

Especially when she mumbles, “Like I hadn’t killed people.” 

 

“Yes, because  _ I’m _ the person who would have judged you for what happened in the arena,” I say dryly before I remember that I’m supposed to be kind to her. “Sorry.”    
  
“Don’t be.” She isn’t even looking at me anymore. She’s got her palms flat on the railing and her pale face tilted up, washed out even further, somehow, by the moonlight. “I don’t even know how long it’s been since I’ve been outside.”    
  
Oh.    
  
The porch was Peeta’s favorite part of our house -- her house -- in the Victor’s Village. She told me once, as if the story was funny, rather than distressing, about how when she worked at her family’s bakery she would count down the hours until she got to go outside and feed the pigs, just to be away from the heat of the ovens. How she wasn’t allowed to linger, but sometimes after everyone was asleep she would hold her head out the window of the room she shared with both of her sisters. Only, there’s so much I would have to explain about why she told me that story to begin with that I don’t bother even trying. 

Instead, I say,    
  
“We were underground too.”    
  
“In Thirteen,” she says. “So I’ve heard.”    
  
“Oh. Yeah, of course,” I say. 

“Why are you still here?” she asks. “I just mean -- I would leave. If I could.” 

  
I would, too. 

 

. . . 

  
Peeta had apparently made quite a few trips into town already that morning. By the time we arrived at the little apartment above the butcher’s shop, more than one bottle of fancy Capitol wine was being passed around. 

 

“I thought Rooba only had girls,” I whispered, and just as Peeta turned to say something, grinning, I was nearly knocked off balance by the force of the hug I received from another blonde. 

 

Delly was wearing one of the less ostentatious dresses they sent to Peeta to try on in preparation for our upcoming nuptials. It had been altered, clearly. Taken in in some places, let out in others. The string of pearls that once rested along the neckline had been removed -- by Delly or Peeta, I wasn’t sure. 

 

“I didn’t think you were coming!” she squeaked. “Oh, I’m so happy you’re here.”   
  
I didn’t doubt that. For some reason, though I hadn’t ever been more than passingly friendly with Delly, she seemed to hold genuine affection for me. Maybe because Peeta did. 

  
“I like your dress,” I lied, though it did look like she liked it much more than Peeta had. I didn’t realize we were allowed to loan them out. Probably we weren’t, and Peeta would just claim ignorance if she were caught.    
  
Delly started babbling at that. Telling me how generous and wonderful Peeta was, as if I didn’t know already. Sometimes, when I started having to spend time with her, I thought she was trying to make me jealous. Trying to exert some claim over Peeta, my Peeta, who Delly had known longer. I mentioned that to Peeta one night long after the merchant girl had gone home, and she assured me -- several times, with her clever fingers working over me until I was a panting mess -- of just how little interest she had in anyone else. 

 

_ “Delly’s too much like me anyway,” she assured me after. “But you? You’re perfect. Especially when you get jealous.”  _ _   
_ _   
_ Delly tugged Peeta off into one of the bedrooms, citing something about how Peeta has to be the one to do up her hair, and Peeta laced her fingers with mine on the way past. I allowed them to pull me away, grateful not to have to be alone in a room full of merchants without Peeta, even one as sparse at the sitting room. 

  
“It’s a merchant thing,” Peeta informed me as she came into place just behind Delly, who wasn’t quite looking at her reflection in the mirror. 

 

“Usually your mother does it,” Delly interjected, and for once her voice sounded nearly unsure. Peeta’s hand squeezed at her shoulder, a reassuring gesture I recognized. 

 

“Or your sister,” Peeta said softly, and a smile spread across Delly’s face, slow but so sure. 

 

“Or your sister,” she agreed. “The toasting ceremony isn’t really over until your spouse undoes the braids.” And then, to Peeta rather than to me, she said, “Is this her first merchant wedding?”    
  
“No one else is exactly lining up to have a seam dyke at their toastings,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed, and Peeta’s lips twitched down for just a moment, like they always did when I called myself that. I didn’t know if it was the seam part or the dyke part that she hated. 

 

“You’re welcome at any party I throw,” Delly informed me. “You know, I always wanted to be your friend.”    
  
I snorted. “Yeah, I’m sure.”    
  
“No, I did!” she assured me. “Peeta was so in love, and she was always talking about you, and I thought --  _ hey!”  _ she squeaked, though clearly not in pain, shooting a look at Peeta, who might have tugged her hair a little harder than she needed to. “I thought I could just introduce her to you I could have saved us both a lot of pining.”    
  
“But you didn’t have to,” Peeta said, almost smug. “I had it handled.”    
  
Delly cackled. “Handled!” she repeated. “One time she looked at you in the cafeteria and you nearly passed out!”    
  
Peeta turned all red at this. “I was -- playing the long game,” she said after a long moment. And then, meeting my eyes in the mirror, she said, “Once I finally worked out what to say to you, you would have had no choice but to fall in love with me.”    
  
Delly rolled her eyes. “One time you left a hair tie by the back steps of the bakery and she--”    
  
“All set!” Peeta interrupted, a little frantic. “Delly, look how--”    
  
“--she found it and she wore it for  _ months _ ,” Delly continued, undeterred. “I told her  _ that  _ was her opening, returning your long lost hair tie, but--”    
  
“Do you think I should add a ribbon?” Peeta asked, clearly desperate to steer the conversation back to a safer topic. “Maybe Rooba has--”    
  
“She got so embarrassed every time she tried to work up the nerve. She thought--”    
  
“Delly, please,” Peeta said, nearly purple now. “You’ve made it so long without--”    
  
“You would be angry that she held onto it for so long.”    
  
“Wait, my  _ leather _ hair tie?” I said, and Peeta bit down so hard on her bottom lip that the skin around it went all white. Delly threw her head back, howling with laughter, and I said, “How long did you hold onto it?”    
  
“Um.” She swallowed. “A while.”    
  
“Peeta!” Delly gasped around her laughter. “ _ No _ . Tell me you don’t still have it.”    
  
“I just-- it was never the right time to return it.”    
  
“I loved that hair tie,” I said. “I thought it was lost to the woods.”    
  
Peeta looked so pained that I couldn’t help my laugh. “It’s not funny!” she objected. And then, to me, she added, “I made her promise she’d never tell you.”    
  
“It  _ is  _ funny,” Delly said. “And it’s my wedding day. So I think I get a pass.”    
  
“Sure, Dell,” Peeta said, and though her voice was soft I could tell the teasing really was bothering her, so when she stepped out into the living room under the guise of getting a drink, I followed her. 

 

“Peeta,” I said when she didn’t pause long enough to see me following her. She waited until she had poured herself a glass of the stuff before she turned to look at me. 

 

“Please,” she said, though there was more gravity in her voice than I noticed before. “I can’t really bear to hear much more about how pathetic I am.”    
  
“Pathetic?” I echoed, and she laughed drily, nearly draining her cup in one go. “Peeta. I don’t think you’re--”    
  
“I’m not an idiot,” she said. “I know when I’m being laughed at.”    
  
“Hey.”    
  
“It’s fine,” she lied, and she was reaching for the bottle again but I grabbed her wrist and dragged her away, pulling us into a room that I didn’t even realize was a bathroom until I had already locked the door behind us. 

 

“I wouldn’t be here with you if I thought you were an idiot.”    
  
She swallowed, sitting on the edge of the tub. 

 

“You still have it?” I asked, and she nodded, though she still looked about two degrees north of mortified, blue eyes trained on the tile floor.    
  
“I can give it--”    
  
“No.”    
  
She looked up at me at this. “I thought you loved it.”    
  
“You do too, obviously,” I said. And then, my voice going a little softer even though I didn’t want it too, I added, “How could anyone not be flattered by that?”    
  
Her eyes slid shut. “ ‘s embarassing,” she mumbled. 

 

“Not to me,” I said, moving to sit on her lap, my legs hanging into the side of the tub. Her hands came to my hips immediately to steady me. “Someone like you,” I said, and her breath hitched. “That wild over me?”   
  
She surged forward to kiss me at this, hands pulling me closer. I started to worry that she would fall back into the tub, but she was so steady, solid as a rock. 

 

“You weren’t kidding about finding someplace to sneak off to,” I said breathlessly as she kissed at my throat. She kissed at the hollow just behind my ear and I clenched my teeth to hold back my groan. “Fuck, Peeta, we shouldn’t--”    
  
“I won’t,” she assured me, eyes bright and earnest. “I just wanna--” she trailed off, preoccupied again, and I flushed at the thought of heading back out to the party with my throat all covered in marks from Peeta. 

  
“They already think I’m--”    
  
She pulled away at this. “What do they think?” she asked urgently. “Did someone say--?”    
  
“They don’t have to,” I tried to explain, but felt dumb. It’s not like she would understand. Only, she just clutched me against her tighter and said,    
  
“This isn’t exactly Town, Katniss.”    
  
I snorted. “We’re in the middle of--”    
  
“Delly’s marrying Rooba’s  _ daughter _ .”    
  
Oh. “They can do that?” I asked dumbly, as if I didn’t know women who married each other in the Seam. “I mean -- their parents let them?” I had heard enough about Peeta’s betrothal, which never seemed entirely optional when she told me about it.    
  
“Not the Cartwrights,” she said. “And -- you know, they’ll be called friends or roommates for the rest of their lives. But Delly was never going to get the shoeshop. She has too many brothers. And Rooba isn’t exactly one to pitch a fit about who her daughter loves.”    
  
“Delly loves you,” I said. “I’m sure she just thought --”   
  
“You don’t have to defend her,” Peeta said, laughing. “She’s like my sister. I don’t care if  _ she  _ thinks I’m pathetic.”    
  
“I don’t. Think you’re pathetic.”    
  
She nodded at this, leaning forward just a little to rest her head against my chest.    
  
“We should probably get back out there.”    
  
“Probably,” she agreed. “But can we just -- stay here, a minute?”    
  
My hand came up to her hair. “As long as you want.”    
  


 

The toasting wasn’t incredibly different from one in the Seam. The building of the fire, the toasting song. Of course, the cake Peeta brought was more decadent than anything we would be able to make for ourselves in the Seam. There wasn’t a fiddler, either, which may have had more to do with the size of the ceremony than its location. Delly and Rooba’s daughter were nearly inseparable from the moment they were allowed to see each other again. 

 

Peeta’s grip on my hand was steady. Not uncomfortable, but her fingers were laced between mine tightly enough that I couldn’t keep myself from glancing over at her. She was working hard at keeping her expression schooled. How different was this from the wedding she would have had this summer if we hadn’t been through the games? How different from the wedding she would have imagined? 

  
She would have imagined it, certainly. How could I think she hadn’t, if she still had a hair tie I lost when I was fifteen? When I joined in on the toasting song, she brought our joined hands up and kissed at my knuckles. Almost entirely unconscious. She never had to think about it, how much she loved me. The affection just spilled out of her. 

  
  
We stayed even after the guests started to file out. I stationed myself in the kitchen, because dishes were at least the same whether you were doing them in the Seam or the Victor’s Village or the Merchant Quarter. Peeta found me and came to stand beside me, her shoulder bumping against mine, at the ready to start drying the dishes as soon as I finished them. This was our routine at home, too. 

 

“We should probably head home soon,” she said softly. 

 

“I still have some dishes left to--”    
  
There was the unmistakable slam of a bedroom door and laughter from the girls inside. 

 

“Okay,” I said. “Yeah. Sure.”

 

  
Only, I didn’t let her walk us home. At last, not to the home we shared. 

 

I still spent time in my old home in the Seam pretty frequently. Never a full night, but a few hours here or there. Prim and my mother didn’t seem to feel as much allegiance to the old lopsided shack as I did. But then, sometimes I thought they just barely even counted as being Seam. 

 

It was different. Having Peeta there. And especially with her looking so . . . merchant, in her toasting outfit. She was pretending not to look too curious, I could tell. I emptied the pot that had been collecting rainwater since I last visited into the kitchen sink and waited for her to say something.    
  
She was drunk. Face all flushed, slow smile spreading across her lips even as she tried to smooth it out. She leaned back against the doorframe. 

 

“There’s, um, not too much left around here,” I said. “I can get you some water. If you want.”    
  
“I’m all right,” she said, leaning back against the kitchen wall.    
  
“You should probably drink some,” I fussed. She had a lot of wine at the toasting, though at least not because she was still upset. Not after our conversation in the butcher’s bathtub. 

 

“Later,” she said. “Why’re we here?” 

  
It took me a moment to work up the nerve. “Because,” I began, and then turned away from her, grabbing two of the old cups that remain from our mismatched old dish set and filling them with tap water even if it’ll be like pulling teeth to get her to drink it. “Because we should have a toasting.”

  
It was quiet for just long enough that I had to turn and make sure she was still with me. She blinked, as if processing what I had just said. And then again, eyes scrunching shut a little tighter. Drunk. And almost impossibly happy looking, even if she did look bewildered. 

 

“Do you remember what you said?” I asked. “The night you -- we -- when you . . . the first time,” I stammered. “You said it was for us. You said--”    
  
“Yes.” She crossed the room quickly, taking my face in her hands. “ _ Yes _ . Yes. I’ll marry you.” 

  
And then she was kissing me. It was warm and just a little bit slack from the wine, but also breathlessly giddy. Her hands came to my hair, my neck, my back, tugging me closer against her. I grabbed at her back, my arms looping over her shoulders. She had gained back so much of the muscle mass she lost in the arena -- trained herself, with push-ups and pull-ups, until she was strong again. Strong enough that she managed to pick me up without so much as a second thought. I wrapped my legs around her back and she grinned up at me, clearly so proud of herself. 

  
“Tell me which way to go,” she said, already kissing at my collarbone where it was exposed from the sleeve of her dress. My head tipped back of its own accord and she laughed, warm and a little damp against my skin. “Katniss?” she prompted, even as her lips traveled further down, towards my chest.    
  
I groaned. “Bedroom. Please. I--”    
  
“Course,” she whispered. 

 

I barely managed to guide us away from the bed my mother and sister shared and onto mine. So much smaller than any of the beds we had been on together before. She toppled back onto the mattress first, tugging me down on top of her.    
  
“Been looking at you all night,” she murmured, pushing the sleeve down off my shoulder. “So fucking pretty.”

 

My whole body shuddered at this, and she started sliding the other sleeve down. “Your dress,” I tried to argue weekly. And she laughed. 

 

“Yours now,” she said, kissing at one of the birthmarks on my left shoulder. “Please tell me you’ll wear it for me again.”   
  
I thought, as she started to kiss her way across my skin, that it almost didn’t matter what she asked of  me, I would do it. My hands tangled in her hair, disrupting her braids, and she laughed. 

 

“Is that a yes?” she teased.

 

“ _ Please _ ,” I managed as she toyed with the strap of my chemise. Her fingers darted away to trace along the scalloped edge of one of the small cups. I whined somewhere in the back of my throat and she grinned. 

  
“You’re cocky,” I accused, though my voice wasn’t particularly steady.    
  
“Am not,” she said, and I moved my shoulder to help her finally take down the strap of my underthings. “Just love what I do.”    
  
I laughed, but it -- along with a strange, groaning noise -- was wrenched from my throat when she pressed a feather-light kiss to my newly-exposed nipple. 

 

“You’re so good at it,” I agreed, my hips shifting just a little. “Fuck. Peeta.”    
  
She looked up at me, grin a little wicked, and continued to tease, this time kissing just below.    
  
“I need--” I choked as her hands came to find my lower back and press me down and forward at the same time. “Peeta.  _ Please _ .”    
  
Now I got what I had been waiting for. I tried communicating how good it was, how it felt, and just ended up grunting and trailing off. She took this as all the encouragement she needed, thankfully.    
  
“Gonna take this off. Yes?” she asked, and though I felt the loss of her hands on my skin as soon as I nodded, I didn’t mind terribly if it meant she was flipping us over and shimmying the dress down over my hips. “One favor.”    
  
Of course. She said it with her fingertips just tracing at the stretch marks on my bare hips.    
  
I nodded, my bottom lip tucked between my teeth. “Anything.”    
  
“We shouldn’t toast tonight. Please?” 

  
I laughed. “You mean you don’t wanna --  _ mm  _ \-- get married wine drunk in the middle of the night?”    
  
She groaned. “ _ Please _ . I will if you ask me again. I just -- please. Let me make the bread. I need--”

  
“You can make the bread,” I relented, and her body sagged against mine on the mattress, obviously relieved.    
  
“And a cake,” she said.    
  
“Will you remember to sleep?” I asked as she started to pull at my chemise.    
  
“I have to make you a wedding cake,” she said urgently. “I need--”    
  
“Fine,” I relented. “But nothing too elaborate.”    
  
“Of course not,” she said, and though I was sure that was a lie, I didn’t call her on it. 

 

“And we can’t -- it has to just be us,” I said. Our families would be at the ceremony, later. The one in the Capitol. And I couldn’t risk Prim getting in trouble, not if what we’re doing gets found out about. “I’m sorry. I know it’s probably--”    
  
“I would marry you anywhere,” she said lowly, and a thrill shot through me -- either at the immediacy of what she was saying or the way her leg was nudging up between mine. “I don’t care about anyone else. Just you.” 


	4. You Are My Best Friend (and I have always known you)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> mostly..... just wedding sex lol

It was a little over a week after I asked her to make toast with me, and I had barely seen her in days. I tried not to be annoyed when I came downstairs and realized that she had definitely been lying when she told me she would come up to bed last night. I supposed it made sense when I reached the kitchen and found nearly every surface covered in bread, Of all sorts -- cheese buns and white bread and lots and lots of the stuff she made up that splits the difference between the heavy Seam bread I learned to make when I was small and what she made at the bakery. It would be impossible to pretend not to know what the reason was for her obsessive baking. To pretend that I wasn’t at fault for it.

 

But here she was -- not sleeping, barely eating -- and it was my fault. On the table was a mixing bowl of white icing, an unfrosted chocolate cake covered with a white dome she ordered from the Capitol months ago, and just behind them both, Peeta. She looked so peaceful, head resting on her arms, hair falling out of its short braid, I almost forgot how guilty I should feel. _This is your fault_ , I thought. _She hasn’t slept in days. You never should have agreed to let her make you a cake_.

  
I was supposed to go to the woods today. Rain was coming in the next few days, and I had some traps to check. But I had slept like absolute shit the night before -- a side effect of Peeta never coming up to bed. And besides -- though my gut twisted strangely at the realization -- I had _missed_ her. It wasn’t like Gale had been waiting for me, anyway, since it

wasn’t a Sunday. Even if it had been, I wasn’t sure I would have chosen an awkward, silent trip through the woods over my sleeping fiancee.

  
I took one of the older loaves of bread we had been eating off for the last few days and made  breakfast for us both. Some fried toast dish that she took a liking to in the Capitol and then spent ages working on at home to try to replicate it for us perfectly. Better than perfectly, even, because her bread was so much better than anything a machine could make. I wasn’t quite as good at this dish in particular, but I could always put together a meal out of nothing, an old seam magic trick that fascinated her.

  
I stole more glances at her than I would have admitted to while I cooked. The golden early sun spilling in through the window behind her only added to the tender quality of it all. Peeta Mellark -- my fiancee, asleep and beautiful at my kitchen table.

  
I even fried up some sausages. A favorite of hers, now that we could afford it. I tried to do it gently, but she still startled awake when I set the mug in front of her. Not coffee -- since I planned on bullying her up into the bed as soon as she ate. It was an herbal tea she made for me some nights when my throat was raw from all the screaming. A slow smile spread across her face as she reached for the mug, though the corners pulled down a little when she noticed what was in it.

  
“Mm,” she hummed. “No coffee for me?”  
  
I made sure to set my mug on the table just a little closer to my seat, noticing how covetously she was looking at it. “You promised you would sleep. If I let you do the baking.”  
  
I didn’t mean for it to come out like such an accusation, but it did.  
  
Thankfully, Peeta laughed. “I did,” she protested, straightening a little more to make room for the plate as I set it down in front of her. “You’ve been busy. Good morning, by the way.”  
  
“Morning,” I agreed, sitting down across the table from her in front of my own plate. “Breakfast first. And then you go up to bed.”  
  
She laughed. “Someone’s bossy this morning. I need to--”

 

“You need to sleep,” I interrupted. And then I added, though I sounded a lot more petulant than I meant to, “I slept awful last night.”  
  
“Oh.” She sounded remorseful. “I’m just -- working on the bread. I need to--”  
  
“None of this will work, anyway, if it’s for the toasting,” I continued, though when I glanced up she looked so hurt that I regretted it immediately. “Sorry. I mean--”  
  
“No, it’s okay,” she said softly, pushing at some of the toast on her plate. “It’s your wedding too. Um, it isn’t like I can just show up at the bakery. But if you want, I could--”

  
“I want the bread with the nuts.”  
  
She sucked in a sharp breath at this. “I haven’t made that since I left the bakery.”  
  
“But would you?” I asked, already trying to imagine what I would say, if the answer was no.  
  
“Katniss,” she said, voice lower and more earnest than it should have been that early in the morning. “I would make anything for you.”

 

Something warm sparked low in my gut, funny and warm .  
  
“Tonight,” I announced. Her eyes were trained on me, wide and panicked.

 

“Tonight?” she echoed. “That’s so soon. I need--”  
  
I shifted in my seat a little, trying not to let the hot shame of rejection completely bury me. “We don’t have to,” I said, and she pressed herself against the table in her haste to grab at my hand.

 

 _“No_ ,” she said. “No. That’s not it!”  
  
“It’s fine,” I lied. “It’s not like we won’t be--”  
  
“It’s the cake,” she said, her hand gripping against mine so tightly that I thought she might cut off the circulation. “It’s just the cake, Katniss. I just need to make us a wedding cake. And I’m fast, but I’m not that fast. I just -- please. One more day. That’s all I need. _Please_ .”  
  
I swallowed. “Tomorrow,” I agreed, and relief washed over her face. “But you come upstairs with me as soon as you’re finished eating and get some sleep.”  
  
Her tongue darted out to lick at her lips. “Sleep,” she repeated. “Or . . .?”  
  
Oh.  
  
I shifted a little and didn’t even bother hoping she didn’t notice because her smile got just that little bit more self-satisfied. “You have time?” I asked.  
  
“I always have time for you,” she said, and it was too much, her eyes locking onto mine as she licked a bit of syrup from the outermost tine of her fork. My eyes closed of their own accord and she hummed out a laugh, warm and affectionate. “Just got a little wrapped up. I’m sorry.”  
  
I crossed my legs under the table and summoned every bit of courage I had to say, “You’ll have to make it up to me, then.”  
  
She groaned, as she always did when I managed to say the kind of things that came so easily to her. “Dishes later?” she asked, and I cracked my eyes open to see her shoveling the rest of her toast into her mouth. I laughed -- half at her urgency and half because she must have known that I wouldn’t let her get away without at least having breakfast -- but started eating a little faster, myself.

  


Peeta all but dragged me up the stairs behind her, her fingers laced tightly with mine. I thought, watching as she took the stairs, that maybe it was more than was advisable with her prosthetic. Only, she was laughing, so I was, too. Even when we reached the landing and she used that same hand to pull me in all close. My laugh died just a little on my lips when her other hand reached my lower back, something breathless and new replacing it as I anticipated her kiss.

  
It didn’t come. Not at first. Like she hadn’t made me wait long enough. Her hand trailed up from my wrist and skimmed across my flannel-clad shoulders to my jaw. Her thumb traced against my bottom lip, just enough pressure to tug it to the side, and I shivered. My body wracked with it and she hummed out a little satisfied laugh.  
  
“Can’t fucking believe I’ve kept you waiting,” she whispered, as if she wasn’t still doing exactly that. “Katniss Everdeen, sitting around wanting me. I’m so stupid,” she said.

 

“You’re not,” I tried to argue, and she just tipped her forehead against mine and said,  
  
“I -- I’m down there baking like some kind of idiot while you’re upstairs waiting for me.” Her fingers came to the top button of my thick flannel and slipped it free easily. “Good?” she asked.  
  
I whined. Yes. Yes, it was good. But I had on a whole other layer underneath it. “ _Peeta_ ,” I said. And then, “I need-- _Please_ . Don’t make me wait. I need--”  
  
She kissed me, at last, warm and deep and sweet as the syrup from our breakfast this morning. I sighed, relieved, and she laughed, crowding me back against the wall. “Gonna just,” she murmured, not pulling away long enough to explain. But her hands were at the buttons again, more urgent this time.

  
“Shouldn’t we--?” I started as she pushed the sleeves down off my shoulders. It pooled by my feet. “Bedroom?” I managed.  
  
“No,” she said, pulling back far enough to tug my tee shirt off and toss it somewhere over her shoulder. “Not making you wait anymore.”  
  
Her hands slid up my hips and to my chest. Even though the soft fabric of my camisole, it was enough to make my skin pebble. My head fell back against the wall and she kissed my exposed throat. My fingers tangled into her hair, as if she wasn’t already grounded here.

  
Her free hand came down, sliding over my hip and to the back of my thigh, urging it up to wrap around her back. It worked to draw her even closer against me, certainly, which seemed to be her main motivation. Her hips rocked forward -- so different with me up against her like his -- and I couldn’t help my groan at the friction of her thigh against the crotch of my jeans, which she echoed.

 

“I’m - _oh!_ \-- gonna lose my balance,” I gasped out, and she said,  
  
“Not gonna let you fall.”  
  
The backs of her nails skated across my stomach on their way down. She popped the button and let my leg back down, and I babbled something about how I knew she wouldn’t let me fall while she pulled down the zipper of my pants.

 

“Peeta,” I gasped as those clever fingers worked under the waistband of my cotton underwear. “ _Fuck_. Oh--” my hips shifted towards her and she hummed.

 

“Holy hell, you make such pretty noises.”  
  
I tried to hum in response, but it turned into a weird, half choked gasp when she redoubled her efforts.  
  
“Even prettier,” she said, and I panted, even though I was trying to control my breathing. “Don’t be quiet for my sake, love,” she whispered. “Please.”  
  
I cried out -- more at how her fingers felt against me than in compliance with her request. But still. Her lips found my throat again sometime just before my hips came to a final crest against her hand, and I had barely slumped against the wall before, as promised, she was gathering me up against her again.

 

She carried me to the bedroom, at last, setting me down on the bed with enough gentle reverence to reveal just how precious and fragile she thought I was. “More?” she asked, and I just pulled her head down against me, close enough that she could feel my still-pounding heart through my chest.  
  
“Wait,” I said at last. “Don’t go anywhere.”  
  
She laughed. “Wasn’t planning on it,” she assured me, affection clear in her voice even as she teased. “How could I?”  
  
I wanted to come up with something clever to say in response. Only, then her hand came to my shoulder, gently playing with some of the hair that fell out of my braid when I was thrashing my head around against the wall earlier.

  
“Do you want . . .?” she started, the back of her head tilting down towards my still jean-clad legs, and I said,  
  
“Want you to stay and fall asleep with me.” It was hardly a command. But still, I added, “Please?”  
  
“That was part of the deal, I thought,” she said softly, and I relaxed into the mattress a little further, relieved that she wasn’t about to leave. I stroked my hand over her head, which was still on my chest, just by my camisole. She hummed happily, one of her arms coming up to rest over my stomach. “But, um, if you decide you want me to, you know--” she said, though her eyes were already sliding shut. “Just wake me up.”  
  
I laughed. “Yeah, sure, all right.”

 

. . .  
  
I sat across the table from her while she worked late into the night, not daring to distract her when she was so clearly engrossed in her frosting. The cake itself wasn’t gigantic -- I suppose it didn’t have to be, if it was just for the two of us, but I still expected her to go back on her promise not to make it too elaborate. It was beautiful, though, certainly. Everything she made was.

 

She decorated with buttercream, because she knew I prefered it to the stuff that hardened for the flowers she usually made. It was like she was painting a canvas. She was decorating with wildflowers, again. A field dotted with them. Red columbine, clover, even some dandelions. I made us a snack and tried not to distract her too much by watching her, but she was so focused.

  
She turned her face towards mine when I set the plate next to her, giving me a quick kiss. She looked so happy. “Hey,” she rasped. She had been quiet for so long that her voice was a little hoarse. “You don’t have to stay up for me.”  
  
I scoffed. “How else am I gonna make sure you get any sleep?”  
  
She laughed. “Fine, fair,” she said. And then, “If this were Town, I wouldn’t even be allowed to see you right now.”  
  
“We certainly wouldn’t be living together,” I agreed.  
  
She snorted softly. “No, it’s an old superstition. Not being allowed to see your bride before the ceremony, starting before dinner the night before. I like this view better, though.”  
  
Something warm bloomed in my stomach, as it always did when she said things like that.  
  
“Town courtships are weird,” she admitted. “You’re barely alone together. Whoever gets the business has so much to learn, anyway. And it’s not like anyone gets married because they like each other, anyway.”  
  
That’s one of the few freedoms we do have in the Seam. Marrying who we want, who we love. It’s why my mother left Town, to be with my father. I wondered for a moment if Peeta would have done the same. It’s not worth even thinking about. Probably we wouldn’t even have ever spoken if it weren’t for the Reaping. She would have married the Donner boy and I would have . . .

 

I’m not sure what I would have done. Worked in the mines, certainly. Maybe I would have stayed at home to take care of my mother as she aged, so I could keep an eye on Prim. It’s not like I had many prospects for a marriage, anyway. Not one where I would have been happy. Gale Hawthorne, my best friend, had tried to kiss me in the Justice Building, after the Reaping, and I managed to turn my face away in time. After, when I saw him in private for the first time, he had kicked at the dirt a little and said,  
  
_“So, I guess we just pretend it never happened, then? Guess I should’ve seen it coming._ ”  
  
I didn’t ask what he meant. I couldn’t. So we did pretend it never happened, and though he wasn’t exactly fond of Peeta, he at least didn’t seem to hate her. Nothing like how Delly Cartwright is with me. But maybe he would have never known, if it weren’t for the Games. Maybe I would have married him anyway.

 

“It’s not like that in the Seam,” I heard myself saying. “I mean -- your families spend time together, but you’re not chaperoned, or anything.”  
  
One of her chapped lips found its way between her teeth as she looked at the cake, but I could see the way the corners of her mouth pull up.

 

“You’d be staying over at my house, probably,” I say. “Toastings get done first thing in the morning in the Seam, because it’s not like your friends can all leave work to come. But you wouldn’t be allowed in the same room as me. For propriety’s sake.”  
  
“Of course,” she murmured. “Can’t have that.”

 

“And the bread. You, um, you’re supposed to keep some of your last Tesserae ration. To bake it with.”

 

It seemed stupid to even bring up. We never had anything left to spare, and it’s not like I knew which ration would be my last. And Peeta probably never took out Tesserae. Like Prim. Lot of good that did them.

 

“Never had anything left from mine,” she said softly. “It all got mixed in with the bakery supplies.”  
  
“Well,” I said, trying not to let my surprise show at a merchant girl taking out Tesserae, “It’s supposed to be to celebrate getting out free,” I said. “So maybe it’s fine to just use the fancy shit, considering.”  
  
She laughed. “What else?”  
  
I had to think about it for a moment. What else wouldn’t she know about? “You light a candle, from the toasting fire. And blow it out after everyone is gone.”  
  
“I’ll bring one,” she said. “So we leave first thing tomorrow morning?”  
  
I nodded.

 

“I better get going on this, then,” she joked softly.

 

. . .

 

Peeta was up before the sun. All those mornings spent baking, I suppose. It didn’t take much for her to wake me. I barely slept at all, even with her warmth behind me. We agreed the night before that we would get dressed at my old house in the Seam, in case anyone saw us heading that way, and she insisted on leaving our bags right by the door.  
  
She made breakfast before we left -- fried eggs and potato hash. Laughed when I protested and said that I must know, surely, that she didn’t plan on just feeding me bread and cake. We ate in silence other than our forks scraping against our plates.

 

“You know, if you don’t want to,” she started, voice halting and soft and so painfully vulnerable.  
  
“I do.”  
  
“I just -- know you haven’t had a lot of choices. I don’t want you to feel like--”  
  
“It was my idea.”  
  
She smiled, though it quivered a little, and said, “It’s probably not the wedding you imagined.”  
  
I snorted. “I didn’t want a wedding.”  
  
The smile fell from her face completely. I don’t think I was imagining the way she paled.  
  
“Not until I was with you,” I amended.  
  
It took a moment for her to realize what I meant, and the smile returned, more radiant, this time.

 

“You know me,” I said. “Would I have asked if I wanted you to try to talk me out of it?”  
  
She shook her head, spearing some potatoes onto her fork.

 

“Then I think you should shut up and marry me.”  
  
I was afraid it was too harsh, but then she laughed -- sudden and loud, head falling back a little. My favorite kind of Peeta-laugh, always so satisfying to elicit, and especially this morning.  
  
  
I couldn’t rent a white dress from Town. Not without someone noticing. And it wasn’t like I wanted to order one from the Capitol. Not for this. So I packed another one of her dresses -- a dusky pink one that she said was once her favorite, but didn’t fit her anymore. It was close enough, on me. I pinned the fabric of the chest some to try to make it fit me better, but then it bunched strangely, so I picked them out while I stared at myself in the cracked bathroom mirror of my old house in the Seam.

 

My parents toasted here. Though it’s usually too awful, too painful, to think about my father, I find myself wondering what it was like for him. The way he used to talk about my mother, even when she wasn’t around, it was clear he counted himself as incredibly lucky to have married her. Did he look into this mirror, maybe before it was covered in the grime that’s inevitable after years in the Seam, and wonder if she shouldn’t be marrying someone who would give her a better, simpler life.

 

I tied up my hair in the best approximation I could of what she did for Delly at her wedding and came out to the living room to find her looking completely miserable at the mirror over the hearth. She looked half dressed -- grey pants up high around her waist, gauzy white shirt done up all except for the top two buttons, revealing a white undershirt, and her dark grey vest hanging open in front of her. I worked at not being distracted. I hardly see Peeta in any state of undress

  
“Hey,” I say.

 

Her eyes slid shutt. “I can’t do my hair,” she admitted, voice wobbling. “It’s stupid. Just -- give me a minute.”  
  
“Let me.”  
  
One eye popped open to look at me in the mirror, and she nodded her consent, though she didn’t seem convinced I could. It was still short from last time we had to hack off the stuff the Capitol attaches. Not long enough to wrap around her head, certainly. But Prim cut her own hair once as a child and once my mother evened it out, it was short like this. I had to figure out how to braid it for her when she asked. I managed two braids, the kind that start small by Peeta’s temples and gather more and more hair as they reach the back of her neck. .The braids are far from perfect-- how could they be, when I hadn’t cut her hair evenly in the first place? Some short, thin wisps hung loose at the back of her neck, and when I brushed my fingertips against them, her skin prickled with gooseflesh.  
  
“Do you care that I’m not wearing a dress?” she asked softly, and I barked out an indignant laugh.  
  
“Does that sound like me?”  
  
“I guess not,” she admitted. “Still.”  
  
“I like the suit,” I said. “You’re beautiful.”  
  
It wasn’t a compliment she liked. And not one that escaped me very often. She shrunk into herself a little and I took her face in my hands and kissed her before she could retreat.  
  
“ _You_ ,” I said. “I don’t care what they did to you. I mean _you_ .”  
  
She considered this for a moment and then nodded, still looking a little uncertain, and I said,  
  
“What’s that one asshole’s name?” I asked, stepping back so she could see how serious I was. “The one -- the sweetshop’s kid,” I continued.    
  
She offered me his name and I jumped on it gratefully, though I was sure I wouldn’t remember.

 

“One time, I heard him talking to his little friends about how pretty you were, and how they wanted to--” I cut myself off. No use in upsetting her with it now. “I was so angry. That other people saw how beautiful you were. How special you were. So I left my schoolbag in the aisle so he’d trip on it.”  
  
She coughed out a laugh. “No, you didn’t.”  
  
“I did,” I said. “I’d do it again.”  
  
She laughed again. “How old were we?”  
  
“I don’t think I have to answer that,” I said, and she grinned at me. “It’s just -- nothing new. Me thinking that.”  
  
She nodded, still not looking entirely thrilled about the compliment.  
  
“You wanna get married?” I asked.

 

This smile was warm and genuine and huge. “So romantic,” she teased.  
  
“You said you’d marry me anywhere,” I reminded her as she finished buttoning up her vest, and she rolled her eyes at me even though she was still smiling.

 

  
She was always so good with fires. It took her no time at all to build the flames in the soot-crusted fireplace in the living room with the wood I had brought in a few days earlier from the woods. She had packed a knitted blanket my mother made from where it usually sat on our couch and she spread it as if for a picnic, so that it would provide padding from the cold hardwood for us both.

 

It didn’t surprise me that she wrote vows. She never missed a chance to tell me about how much she loved me, especially not when she could use pretty words to do it. She held one of my hands in her free one as she held the toasting fork over the fire and told me how she was in love with me, how long she had imagined marrying me, how she never thought it would happen once, let alone twice over. She told me that she loved when I fussed over her, but that she promised, as much as was possible, she wouldn’t give me reason to. And then she let go of my hand to cradle my jaw with one hand as she raised the slice of bread to my mouth with the other, and I couldn’t help leaning into the touch.

  
And then it was my turn. And she was looking at me -- not expectant, exactly, but she was waiting, certainly. And what could I say? What was there left that she hadn’t already articulated? So I sang, instead. The toasting song, first, and then an old lark my father used to sing for my mother, about falling for a girl above your station. And then the way she was looking at me was so much, too much. So I gave her the bread and tried to do the same as what she did to me, with my hand on her chin. Her hand came up to my wrist, anchoring me in place. And then she kissed the crumbs off my lips,

  
She urged me backwards as she kissed me, her hand cradling my head as I went back willingly, so it didn’t fit the hardwood floor. I anchored my arms around her neck, pulling her down on top of me, and once I was sure she wasn’t going anywhere, started to map out her back with my fingertips. She shuddered and sighed and then sat up, so quickly that I thought I must have done something wrong. Only, then she said,  
  
“Can I take this off?”  
  
_“Please_ ,” I breathed, because I so rarely got to touch her skin. She undid the vest and shrugged it off as soon as she finished unbuttoning her white shirt. The white tank top stayed on, though it didn’t much to hide the way her breathing was coming all short.  
  
I bit my tongue. Didn’t tell her how beautiful I thought she was, not after her reaction earlier. Instead, I said, “Definitely don’t mind the suit. Especially now.”  
  
She laughed, breathless and so, so vulnerable. “I think --” she started, and then stopped herself, biting her lower lip. “I want you to touch me,” she said, this time sounding more certain.

 

I nodded, maybe a little bit too eager.

 

In eight months of fucking, she hadn’t gone back on what she said that first night, about not wanting to me to touch a body that wasn’t hers. I hadn’t pressed, and it’s not like I could exactly be upset about it, her being so willing to focus on me instead.

“Yeah. Yes,” I said. “Right now?”  
  
She let out that anxious sighing laugh again. “Maybe you could let me sort of, ease into it?” she asked. “Something more familiar, first.”  
  
Oh. There was no wondering what she meant by _familiar_ , especially not when her eyes trailed over my body like that. I was still laying on my back, neck lifted so I could see her. My head made a little thudding noise as it fell back.

 

“I think that could be negotiated,” I said weakly, legs spreading to make room for her when she came down to kiss me again. The soft fabric of my dress -- her dress -- pulled taut between my legs.  
  
I wondered, suddenly, if I shouldn’t have worn stockings. I hated them, of course, but maybe Peeta would have appreciated the extra effort. Here I was, dragging her to a tiny shack in the Seam, wearing a dress that doesn’t even belong to me.  
  
“Hey. Where’d you go?” Peeta asked, pulling herself back far enough to rest her forehead against mine.  
  
I shook my head. “Hmm?”  
  
“You’re thinking about something,” she accused. “Was it too much pressure? Me asking? Because you don’t have to--”  
  
“ _No_ ,” I said, pulling her back down onto me by her shoulders hard enough for her to collapse onto my chest. She was solid and heavy, but not enough to crush me. “No. Not that.”  
  
It was quiet for a beat. She didn’t go back to kissing me. Just rested her head on my chest and looked up at me, expectant.

 

“I just -- was thinking I should have looked nicer.”  
  
She lifted her head. “ _Nicer_?” she echoed, sounding completely bewildered.

 

“I don’t know,” I said, feeling even more ridiculous now that she had coaxed it out of me. Especially as she pulled herself up to sit. “Like, stockings, or something. A dress you haven’t worn a thousand ti-- _Oh!”_ I squeaked as she used one hand on either of my thighs to tug me down towards where she was sitting.  
  
“Stockings are so much extra work,” she said lowly, fingers already creeping up my thighs, feather-light. “And besides, you hate them.”  
  
I sighed out a laugh at this. Of course, Peeta _would_ know how much I hate the stockings.  
  
“There’s no way you could look any nicer, anyway,” she murmured, tracing along the scalloped edge of my lacy underthings. This part, at least, was something I wore for her. My eyelids fluttered shut, but then she dragged her fingers back down, over the fabric of the dress and up my hips to the fabric that bagged at my chest.

 

Her finger toyed along the line of dusky pink fabric-covered buttons. “I thought we established already how much I love seeing you in my dresses.” She slipped the first one free. “Especially ones that make this so easy.”  
  
The next three followed, and the panel was wide open, exposing the lacy bra I was wearing. I had bought it from town, lacy but not too ornate, with a little ribbon bow between the cups. She swore under her breath, and I shifted under her eyes even though I knew how loving the gaze was.

 

“You’re gorgeous,” she said simply, fingertips running between the edge of the cup and my skin. She blew some cool air onto my skin just to watch me shiver. I bit my bottom lip and she brought her free hand up to gently pull it free with a thumb brushing over my chin. “Careful. Don’t hurt my wife,” she said distractedly. “Or else we might have a problem.”  
  
_My wife_ . It sounded so easy, the way she said it. Her wife. That’s who I was.  
  
“My wife,” she said again, more to herself, this time, maybe realizing the same thing.

 

I would have lifted my back off the floor to let her get to the clasp at the back, but instead she just pulled down both my dress’s sleeves and the straps of the bra down off my arms and pulled the cups down. I shuddered -- half from the chill of the morning air on my skin and half in anticipation. She didn’t make me wait, this time. Just laid down, practically along me, and kissed at the valley between my breasts. There was something about it -- so soft and light it was almost reverent.  
  
“My _wife_ ,” she said again, adoration clear as she kissed her way across my chest. “My love,” she added, breath warm against my pebbled skin. My back arched up towards her and she brought her hands under me, supporting me as I twitched and shivered under that wonderful, clever mouth of hers.  
  
She undid the clasp on my bra as if an afterthought, tossing it away. I wondered briefly if it might have landed in the fire, but then one of her hands came up to my other breast, other hand sprawling out a little against my lower back to ease me down towards the floor so she could kiss her way down my body.  

 

She made me come twice right there on the floor in front of the toasting fire before she so much as stopped for a break. I was still jolting from the aftershocks of the last one when she fell onto her back beside me, breathing as heavily as I would expect, with all the time she just spent with her head under my skirt.

  
“I could do that all day,” she informed me, wiping at her mouth with the back of her hand. It wasn’t the first time she had expressed that sentiment, but it was the first time I didn’t think there was a chance she was joking. “You had the right idea, starting early.”  
  
I laughed, shifting over to put my head on her chest, even as it heaved slightly. She brought a hand up, running it over my hair.  
  
“Didn’t even take your braids out, first,” she said remorsefully. “Some spouse I am.”  
  
“Shut _up_ ,” I groused.    
  
She laughed before I could regret just how sharp it came out. “All right, sorry, sorry, wife,” she said, though it was clear she was teasing me. “I’ll let you enjoy the comedown.”  
  
I grumbled, not saying much of anything, and she kissed the top of my head.  
  
“You wanna go to the bed?” she offered.  
  
“Mm. Don’t wanna get up,” I said.  
  
“I can carry you.”  
  
That promise was, for some reason, so impossibly endearing. I knew it was true. She had done it enough times. I climbed on top of her at this and kissed her, and she groaned at it, warm hands coming up to my hips to steady me. But then one of them slipped, down my thigh and towards my skirt.

 

“ _Peeta_ ,” I whispered against her lips. “No, wait, I--”  
  
I didn’t have to finish that thought. Her hand returned to my hip, where it just barely even touched me. No pressure. Of course.

  
“I want-- can you--? Do you still wanna let me touch you?” I asked at last, my voice low, but mostly because it was so hard to make myself talk. Not a problem Peeta ever had. “I just -- I want to. Please.”  
  
She shuddered beneath me. “I’ve never--” she started, and then sighed when I kissed her throat. “I just mean -- no one’s--” she stopped herself, a broken little moan escaping her this time. I didn’t often get to devote much time to her, when we did this. Not before she would lose her patience and roll me over onto my back and press me to the mattress. The last few times I did, though, I so enjoyed seeing the marks on her pale skin for days afterwards.

 

“So you’re just good at all this naturally, then,” I complained halfheartedly, and she laughed. “It’s not fair,” I said. “What if I suck at it?”

  
She had some sort of smartass reply, I’m sure, but what I got was a weird, choked off moan when I reached the spot where her neck and shoulder meet. Her hands found the back of my head, urging me closer to her. I pressed a light kiss to the spot I had just been sucking at and her whole body wracked.

  
“You’re-- how could you--? You’re so good. Perfect.” she babbled, sounding breathless. “Katniss. Fuck.”  
  
I laughed and her fingers disrupted my braid, just a little, as she tried to tug me against her even more.

 

“Wait, wait,” she said, going stiff beneath me when my hands found the bottom hem of her tank top. “I need-- I have to -- please. I can’t. Sorry. I’m not-- I can’t--”  
  
“Okay,” I whispered, moving my hands back over the fabric to her sides. “Okay. I’m sorry.”  
  
“Thank you,” she breathed, relaxing some, at this. “Thank you, Katniss.”  
  
I kissed the spot on her skin I had just been kissing at, feather light, and moved my hands back over the fabric to her sides. “It’s okay,” I whispered. “Just tell me what to do.”

  
“Touch-- _touch--_ ” she babbled, breathless. She hasn’t had such a problem speaking, before. I felt very nearly drunk on the power. My hand crept down to her thigh and she groaned. “And talk. Like before. Tell me--”  
  
I pulled her earlobe between my lips -- another trick I picked up from her -- and she practically sobbed. “Tell you what?” I asked quietly, pausing to lick at the hollow just beneath. “That I want you?”  
  
Her thighs pressed together at this almost involuntarily, taking my hand with them.

 

“You _want_ me?” she echoed, sounding far too disbelieving for my liking, though still choked. “You have me. Baby. You’ve always--” I grasped her thigh a little and she trailed off into a pretty, desperate moan. “ _Please_ .”  
  
_Baby_ . Something she only ever called me when she was particularly worked up.  
  
“Haven’t had you like this,” I said. “Not except when I dreamed about it.”  
  
She moaned again. “Fuck. _What_ ?”  
  
“Mm?” I asked, coming up to kiss her again, but she pulled away quickly, breathing heavily.

 

“You dreamed--?” she stopped herself, eyelids fluttering shut. “Fuck, that’s so hot.”  
  
“Almost woke you up,” I said. “Asked you to--” I cut myself off, because even now, with me mostly naked on top of her, talking was so hard.  
  
“I wish you had,” she groaned. “What did you dream?”  
  
I didn’t want to talk about it. But she was so eager, so pleading.  
  
“Can I--?” I asked, my hand coming to the button on her pants, and her hips lifted up against me immediately.  
  
“Please _,”_ she practically whined. And then she chanted, “Tell me, tell me, tell me, please. _Please_ .”  
  
I popped the button open and ran both my hands down over the fabric of her slacks, halfway down her thighs. “Dreamed about putting my mouth on you,” I said at last. And this, somehow, was too much for her. Her hand -- the one that had been on my back -- dropped to her hips. She pulled the zipper down herself and I grabbed her wrist to stop her before her hand went any further, because I knew if she started touching herself, I would be frozen in place, and I needed so badly to be the one to make her feel good.  
  
I brought her hand up to my lips and kissed her knuckle. “I’ll stop teasing,” I pleaded, and she watched me, eyes lidded all heavy. “Let me. Please?” I asked. “Please.”  
  
Her eyes fluttered shut, at this. She slipped her hand up so she was holding my wrist instead and led our hands down to her underwear. I didn’t know exactly what I was meant to do. In theory, of course, I did. Peeta touched me enough times, and it wasn’t like I had never touched myself.  
  
But it was different, pulling down someone else’s underthings. Her hand fell away as I finally pulled down the layers of fabric that separated me from her. Her stomach jerked as my fingers up from her hip to the newly-exposed skin. And then, though my fingers were clumsy, she gasped and twitched all the same when my fingers found their mark.

  
I must have whispered something about how slick, how wet she was. Because she was whispering that it was my fault, that this happened every time she gave me an orgasm. That some nights, after I had fallen asleep, she had to take care of herself before she had the chance to sneak away.  


She tilted her hips and whispered _pleas_ es and _oh_ s and _yes_ and _fuck -- fuck, Katniss_ , and I felt like, even though I wasn’t experienced, I wasn’t completely useless.  
  
“Say something else,” she requested, voice wobbling. She was close, I could tell, and though I was never the one to talk during this sort of thing, even though I wasn’t very good at saying something, I tried.  
  
“You have no idea how long I’ve been imagining this,” I whispered, and she shuddered. “You make me feel good all the time.”  
  
She breathed out hard through her nose, clearly trying to be quiet, and I said,  


“No, don’t be quiet.”  
  
She whimpered. I twisted my wrist, and just as my arm was starting to cramp, she groaned out my name and trapped my hand again between her legs as her hips jerked.

  


And then, after it was over, she pushed my hand away weakly and tugged me down to lay on top of her and shivered and cried.

 

“Hey. I’m sorry. Did I--? Was I--?”  
  
“ _No_ ,” she said, lifting a hand to wipe at her eyes, which she rolled at herself. “No. It was beautiful. You were perfect. I just-- am stupid.”  
  
“You’re not stupid.”  
  
She kissed the top of my head. “I just love you,” she said. “That’s all.”

 

It was a long time before we even got around to the cake. We just laid there on the blanket, wrapped up in each other. She took the braids out of my hair and ran her hands through it, gentle and adoring.

  
“My wife,” she whispered yet again, so low I didn’t think she intended for me to hear it.  
  
I lost count, over the next few days, of how many times she said that word. _Wife_. Her wife. No matter what, that title always came out quiet, affectionate, impossibly warm. We didn’t really discuss it, but neither of us were particularly keen to leave the little shack in the Seam. I made a trip out long enough to check in on my traps in the woods, and she circled home to pick up more baking supplies from the Victor’s Village while I was away. We couldn’t stay out there forever, not without someone noticing, but it was so easy to pretend that it was supposed to be that way. That I would have been her wife even if the Capitol weren’t about to force our hands.

 

That it could stay that way. Making fires and cooking for each other and, of course, all the kissing and touching. It was something I liked too much to admit that we would probably never have found our way to each other under any other circumstances. When I came back in from my evening walk, even though I was sweaty and gross, Peeta kissed me up against the wall, mouth sweet and familiar, like --  
  
“Apple pie,” I whispered when she broke away for air and she laughed.  
  
“I meant for it to be a surprise,” she said. “But yes. I was stealing bites while I put it together.”  
  
I laughed. “What’d I do to deserve pie?”  
  
“You _always_ deserve pie,” she assured me, forehead tipping against mine. “No wife of mine goes without dessert.”  
  
“I wish,” I started before I could help myself, and her hands dipped to my hips. She watched me expectantly.  
  
“What?” she asked, and then kissed my throat, as if to coax it from me.

 

“Nothing,” I lied.

 

“Nothing?” she asked, tugging me against her just a little closer. “You sure?”  
  
“Play fair,” I complained, though I wasn’t sure I meant it, as that familiar longing started to build at the base of my stomach, warm and fuzzy.  
  
“Oh, sorry,” she said, and I sighed at the instant loss of her hands. She held them near me, still. So much that I could still feel the warmth near me. “Better?”  
  
I sighed and grabbed her hand, bringing it back to my waist. She laughed.  
  
“What do you wish, love?” she asked, fingers flexing a little against the fabric of my shirt.  
  
“Just -- that it could be like this. For real, I mean. Not . . . just for a few days.”  
  
She brushed her free hand over my braid. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said.

  
Of course, she wasn’t.

  
“No, I know,” I whispered. “I just -- don’t want to go back to the Victor’s Village.” 

  
She hummed. “Guess we just have to make it count, then. When we can sneak away.”  
  
  
She didn’t make me wait to see what she meant, about making it count.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey I wanted to thank the people who are reading this bc i understand that w the demographics of the fandom there aren't a lotta people here for leseverlark and I'm really grateful that the people who are reading this have been engaging with it, bc it makes it so much more fulfilling to write when I don't feel like I'm shouting into an empty gay void. 
> 
> Also a million thanks to my beta jobanana7 for putting up with all the times I end a sentence with shit like "not unkindly"


	5. Riches and Wonders

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trigger warning for referenced/implied self harm in the very last scene. Send me a message on tumblr at fullforcegaysburg if you need the scene without the lines about it, and I can give you an edited version.b

  
“Katniss, darling, you’ve met Finnick Odair, yes?” Effie Trinket asked the night of our first wedding rehearsal, somehow perfectly balanced on her ridiculous heels as she moved between me, my wife, and our bridal party.    
  
“Oh, don’t worry Miss Trinket. Katniss and I go way back,” said Finnick, stepping forward and taking the tips of my fingers in her hand, lifting it to touch her purple-painted lips. She was referring, no doubt, to our single one-on-one interaction, a few months ago, when she offered me a sugar cube and wanted to know my secrets during the tribute parade. “That’s why I told them it had to be me when I heard that they wanted to make Johanna your maid of honor.”    
  
I laughed anxiously, grateful for the gesture. Johanna terrified me. Though Finnick did, too, for different reasons. She was so beautiful. They styled her so differently than they did me and Peeta, all exposed bronze skin and full lips. Her hair -- tight copper coils all teased and arranged just so.    
  
“Um,” I stuttered. “Yeah. Okay. Thank you.”    
  
She laughed, letting my hand down. “We should start to talk bachelorette party, yes?” she asked. “Trust me, I’ve been to plenty, and we need to start planning early.”    
  
I knew  _ of _ Finnick, of course. I had been seeing her around on screens since her Games, when she was fourteen. She was the youngest Victor ever -- the darling of the Capitol, and one of very few victors who spent more time in the Capitol than in their home district. I always felt so lucky once I saw her that, for the most part, Peeta and I were left to ourselves in Twelve. 

  


“Do you, um -- you should meet Peeta. Yes?” I asked, finally sparing a glance over to Peeta, who was clearly putting in a real effort not to look like she was staring. “She’s--”    
  
“I think I’ve seen her around,” Finnick teased, taking Peeta’s hand and repeating the gesture she did  for me, earlier “Finnick Odair,” she offered, like it wasn’t obvious. “I’m a big fan of your fiancee, over here,” she said, and I felt all the blood rush to my face.    
  
“Well, you and I have that in common,” said Peeta, wrapping her arm around my waist and pulling me in tight so she could kiss my temple. “Try not to steal her away from me, all right?” she asked. 

  


Finnick laughed. “Something tells me I couldn’t even if I tried.”    
  
I sputtered. It was too much, all the attention. It was bad enough when it was coming just from Peeta, and I had spent the last two years getting used to the sorts of things she said about me. And that was my  _ wife _ . Finnick Odair was another matter entirely, all sensual and flattering and probably the first girl I had ever really realized I was attracted to. Long before I realized that  _ that  _ was how I felt for Peeta Mellark. 

  


“Go,” Peeta said, kissing my temple a second time. “Have fun with your new friend. I’ll see you tonight.”     
  
“Why are we having separate parties?” I asked. “I mean -- do we have to? Shouldn’t it just be one big one?”    
  
Finnick laughed. “We get it, we get it, you’re in love. But you’ll see plenty of your fiance over the next month. Come along.”    
  


. . . 

  


I wake with Peeta asleep on my bedroom floor. For a moment, I’m confused. Concerned, even. But then I remember my dream last night -- strange and too sharp to feel quite like the one I had in District Thirteen -- the last time I remember being able to feel her arms around me. It wasn’t real, of course, but it was enough to remind me of what it had been like when it was. I had assumed it was more of the same last night, when she had appeared in my doorway as if the sound of my screaming still had any power whatsoever to summon her. I try to remember how she would end up here -- she hesitated after I begged her to stay. I turned off onto my side, upset that even the dream version of her had been corrupted, too. 

  


But here she is. Still. Maybe  _ always _ , like she said, what feels like a thousand years ago. She’s using an old sweater that once belonged to her as a pillow, covered by the top sheet I always kick off my bed in the middle of the night. It’s the first chance I’ve really had to observe her since Prim moved her into our new quarters. She looks -- frail. Maybe it’s the way she’s all curled up onto herself this way. I know the smart thing to do would be to sneak out as quietly as I could. But I’m not exactly smart when it comes to her. 

  


I cough as I stretch, hoping to wake her that way. But she doesn’t so much as flinch. Not until I resort to crouching down and touching her arm to wake her up. She startles,  groggy and panicked as she flies up into a sitting position, eyes flicking around the room as she tries to place herself. 

  
“Hey, no, no, it’s okay,” I say, though the way her eyes narrow proves that whatever trust she had in me last night is gone this morning. “Sorry. I just--”    
  


She reaches up to wipe the sleep from her eyes. “You were screaming,” she says, her voice a little croaky, like it always is in the mornings. Like it always  _ was  _ in the mornings. It’s been so long since I’ve seen her this early. 

  


“I’m sorry,” I say, though once, I wouldn’t have thought twice about waking her.    
  
She shakes her head, just a little, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth before she says,    
  
“Don’t be. It’s not like I was asleep anyway.”    
  
“Well. You can have the bed,” I say, standing up. “I’m awake now. Thanks for staying.”    
  
The smile that spreads across her face isn’t quite the same as the ones she used to give me so easy. It’s reserved. Not exactly familiar, but closer to that than I’ve seen in such long time. 

  


“I have my own room, you know,” she jokes. But she doesn’t follow me out. 

Prim is already awake. I stay in the sitting room for a moment, just out of sight as she leans forward, her forearms on the dining room table. The surface hasn’t seen the light of day since shortly after our arrival, but she’s clearly been busy clearing it off. For a moment, panic seized me. Has she given Peeta everything back? What do I have left to remember her by? 

  


The thought is so stupid. Peeta herself is here. In my bedroom. She’s the one who owns all this stuff to begin with. 

  
My sister smiles, speaking so softly that I can’t hear her. I’m concerned again, for a moment. Who’s here? My mother? She’s the last person I’d like to see right now. But then someone passes behind me, ghosts their hand against my lower back and murmurs, 

  


“I knew you couldn’t stay away too long.” 

  


I would recognize her low voice anyway. Low and rich and as smooth as velvet. I whip around, my concern from earlier forgotten as I launch myself at Finnick. She laughs but embraces me readily -- a comfort I didn’t even realize I’ve missed so terribly until right now, while she’s holding me. 

  


She’s muscular, maybe even more so than Peeta at her very strongest. Still, though, I close my eyes for a moment and tell myself that I’m not imagining another set of arms. Of course, though, it’s Finnick. I can’t pretend for long. She’s more lithe, for one, and for another, she’s willing to touch me at all.    
  


  


“What are you doing here?” I ask, trying to remember to be quiet. In case Peeta really is trying to go back to sleep.    
  
“Annie had some business to take care of with one of her old doctors. Figured if we had to do the nightmare tour, we might as well see our friends.” She steps back and pauses for a moment to look me over, hands on my shoulders. Her lips twitch down from their usual smile. “How did you  _ lose  _ weight after we got off the rations?”    
  
I shrug her hands off. “I didn’t,” I lie. 

  
Truthfully, without the strict schedule from District Thirteen, I’ve been skipping meals more often than not. Not intentionally. But it’s hard to even imagine having an appetite most days. 

  


“You must be relieved,” I say. “Poor thing. You were worried you wouldn’t be the prettiest one in the room.”    
  
She laughs -- loud and warm and unrestrained. Like someone who gained more in the war than she lost. “Oh, sweetheart,” she says, and I flinch at the nickname. “You know I never have to worry about that.”    
  
I manage a weak smile at this, batting her hand away when it comes to my hair. She frowns at the state of it and starts on what I’m sure is about to be a lecture, but I roll my eyes and shift away and she realizes that she shouldn’t start with me now. 

  
“Hey,” she says. “Your sister made breakfast.” She tilts her head back, sending her riot of copper curls shaking. “I can’t tattoo it on your arm, but I can make you come eat. Even if I have to drag you in there myself.” 

  
I sit beside my sister, across from Finnick and Annie, and swipe her mug of coffee. She protests -- loudly -- as I gulp down more than half of her drink, but I so rarely have the chance to tease her anymore, and she gets so worked up when I do this. 

  


“You don’t even like it black!” she huffs, pushing her chair back and heading to grab another mug from the kitchen.    
  
  


When Peeta emerges, she attaches herself to Annie immediately. Annie, too quiet for me to make out what she’s saying, murmurs to Peeta and runs her hands over the fuzz on her head. Peeta sort of collapses against her, and Annie just . . . holds her. My arms feel strange -- hollow and shaky and desperate. 

  
_ That should be me _ , I think pathetically, forcing my eyes away as Annie tilts her forehead against Peeta’s, eyes closed. I haven’t spent much time around Annie Cresta one on one -- haven’t had the chance to, considering everything. She was with us in District Thirteen, though she was so silent then, even more than usual, and there wasn’t exactly much time to bond when I was so sick with worry over Peeta. 

  


Maybe she was, too. 

  


“Hey.”    
  
It’s Finnick. Her voice is soft. Low. Just enough to pull me from my thoughts -- and my apparent mission to chew my bottom lip to a bloody pulp. 

  


“What do you say we take a walk?” she asks. 

  


. . . 

  


I knew the cadence of Peeta’s knock by heart long before I opened the door to let her in to my quarters. Still, though, I pretended to be scandalized at the sight of her as she slipped in. The truth was, I was mostly relieved. I had only seen her in tiny bits and pieces over the last few weeks. Beside me at dinners, mostly, when we couldn't really talk. And at night. Always at night, when she would sneak into my bed in the dark. Every night until two nights ago. 

  


“I feel overdressed,” I joked weakly. She was really so much less done up than I was in her jeans, even with the fancy blue leather belt she was wearing with them. She was wearing a tunic, too, a burgundy thing so light it may as well have been sheer and her thick tank top underneath it, now a staple in anything she picked for herself. 

  
“You’re beautiful,” she said, and kissed me quick and tender. “I was coming last night,” she whispered, her lips just barely off of mine. “I tried. They locked my fucking door, and I was gonna try the window, but--”   
  
I kissed her back, lacing my fingers into the hair at the back of her head. “It’s fine,” I whispered back. “Figured you were just tired.”    
  
It was a lie. I knew something was very wrong if Peeta wasn’t coming to my room. But still, it seemed to make her feel a little better. Or, at least, upset about something different.    
  
“Never,” she breathed. “Couldn’t sleep at all.”    
  


“You know it’s bad luck for you to be here,” I joked weakly. “I’m in my wedding dress. You--?”   
  
She stepped back and peeled her tunic off. My mouth went completely dry as she tossed the garment onto my bed. I couldn’t remember what I had been even attempting to say. 

  


“Your dress,” she said. “They’re fitting it?”    
  
I nodded weakly and she said,    
  
“Can I have it?”    
  
I nodded, moving my arms just enough to let the fabric I had been holding up around my chest pool at my feet. It was stupid -- nothing she hadn’t seen before. But the slip I was supposed to wear with the dress was so . . . slinky. Lace and silk and barely even long enough to touch my thighs. 

  


“Oh, holy hell, Katniss,” she rasped, eyes caught on my hands as I tried to tug the slip down. “Wow.”    
  
“It’s not done. They have to finish changing it. It’s too lose. Around the -- my chest.” I laughed anxiously, because she wasn’t making any moves towards me or my dress, even as I stepped out of it and nudged it a little closer to her with my bare foot. “I mean. No surprise, right? You know how I’m built. There’s not a lot to--”    
  


“I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said, lips twisting up in a wry smile, like maybe she wasn’t so sorry about it at all. “I’ll argue about all that later. Do you mind if I just toss that dress out in the hall?” she asks. “So they can finish with the hemming, and the -- ah.”    
  
She cut herself off when I crouched to pick up the dress. 

  
“We’ll deal with that whole  _ how you’re built _ thing in a minute,” she said, gathering up the dress. I could tell that it was too late -- someone was on the other side of the door. But Peeta said that it was fine, that I was feeling a little under the weather and that she had faith in Cinna that he could finish the mending without me. 

  
And then she leaned back against the door, only for the briefest moment before she grabbed the writing desk by the bottom edge and dragged it across the floor until it blocked the entrance. It made an awful screeching sound, but she was determined, and I was . . . distracted. Her arms were such a weakness of mine, and she was so strong. 

  


“Now then,” she said, a little out of breath as she leaned back against the desk. She took two, three deep breaths and said, “Where were we?” 

  
I crossed the room and kissed her. My foot nudged between hers and she leaned back against the desk even further, hands pressing flat against the surface of the desk.    
  
“I think you were showing off,” I whispered, kissing her throat. She laughed incredulously. 

  


“Me?” she echoed. “How on earth am I the one showing off? You’re standing here in--” she cut herself off on a moan when I found the hollow behind her ear. Her hands grappled at my back, pulling me closer. 

  


“Hauling the furniture around,” I interrupted, kissing her shoulder. “And you can’t make fun of me. About the slip. I didn’t realize you would--”    
  
She groaned, like she was in actual pain, and I rolled my eyes. The confidence I was already feeling from the noises I was eliciting from her earlier dry up, but when I tried to step back she put her hands on my waist to stop me.    
  
“Hey. Wait, no,” she whispered. And then, more urgently, “ _ Nonono _ , who’s making fun?”    
  
“I didn’t realize I was going to have company,” I said, and before I could just slip away, she managed to put me between her and the desk. She dropped a feather-light kiss on the strap of the lacy thing. “Don’t worry, it’s fine,” I said. “I’m just going to put on something less--”    
  
“You still have no idea, do you?” she asked, her hands coming to my waist. “Legs, please?”    
  
I smiled tightly. “You don’t--”    
  


“Gonna level with you,” she said, voice urgent, blue eyes bright and earnest and trained on me. “I don’t know how much time we’ve got before they tear this door down and haul us out for dinner. But it won’t be enough for me to get you off as many times as I’d like, so my suggestion is that we start now.” 

  
Oh. I wrapped my legs around her at this and she grinned.     
  
“Kinda thought you’d see it my way,” she breathed, guiding me up onto the desk. 

  
  
And after, when she asked me if I could just hold her, just for a little while, of course I said yes. She was the one who did the holding, usually, but she so rarely asked me for anything. It took me a moment to figure out the logistics, but then I ended up just pulling at her head until it was against my chest, and she curled herself around me, a small, content sigh escaping her. 

  


“Don’t wanna let any doors between us till we get home,” she breathed, forehead tipping against my collarbone.    
  
“They might have a problem with that.”    
  
“Don’t care,” she said.    
  
“Bad luck for you to see me in my dress, and all,” I continued, my hand coming to card through her hair. I was already imagining    
  
“Katniss. I already saw you in your wedding dress,” she said lowly. She knew what she was doing, just vague enough not to set off any alarms if we’re being listened to. But intense enough to make something warm and familiar bloom in my stomach.    
  
It was quiet for a moment.    
  


“It’s stupid. It’s so stupid,” she whispered. “I knew they weren’t going to come. But I still just . . .”    
  
She shook her head and I pulled her a little closer. “You’re not,” I said. I knew I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like if my sister wasn’t coming on the train tomorrow. “They’re stupid.”    
  
She snorted softly. “I imagined at least having Delly there.” 

  
I kissed her forehead and she melted against the bed. “So we’ll invite her over when we get home.”    
  
She laughed. “You’d marry me a -- another time?” she looked disbelieving. And happy, more importantly.    
  
“We’ll have a dinner,” I acquiesced. “Delly and her wife, anyone else you want.” 

  
“Your mother and sister?” she asked.    
  
I sputtered, incredulous. “Come on. Do you really want to have my mother at--?”    
  
“I do.” She was serious, again, but not hopeful. It wasn’t supposed to be guilting. “I love you. And you have this family, and--”   
  
“Fine,” I said. “She’ll be there.” 

. . .    
  


  


I’m not surprised that Finnick still knows her way around the Capitol. She has a better sense of it than I ever did, hopefully more than I ever would. She ties her copper corkscrews onto the back of her head and asks me if I’d like to get out of the Tribute Center, and I do. Of course, I do. But I haven’t known where else I would even be allowed to go, since I’ve been stuck back here. As she leads me through the streets that branch out from the City Circle. I had assumed it would still be deserted after the war, and while things certainly are different, we’re far from the only ones milling about.    
  
“I didn’t realize they were so close,” I said at last.    
  
“Annie is rarely loud about how much she likes someone,” Finnick returns, clearly not bothered.

  


I imagine it must be impossible, her being as upset as I am. It must be different when your wife is so clearly in love with you.

  


“But yes,” she says, touching my back to guide me towards another skyscraping building. “They got close around your wedding. Annie was--”    
  
“Her maid of honor, I know,” I interrupt as we reach yet another glass elevator. She punches a button near the top and it shoots up. “But they chose you guys for us.”    
  
“ _ We _ got close,” Finnick reminds me, bumping her shoulder against mine before she types a ten digit passcode into the elevator panel and the doors slide open.    
  
“What is this place?”    
  
“It’s mine,” she says, striding through the doors without waiting for me to follow. “From back when I had to -- stay out here,” she says evasively, green eyes flitting away. “Anyway, Annie still has to see her doctors in person every few months. And I know she’ll never be able to sleep in the Tribute Center. So, not planning on selling it until we’re out of the woods.”    
  
Oh. “I don’t blame her,” I admit. “I can’t sleep out there, either.”    
  
“Sounded like you blamed her a minute ago,” teases Finnick, a gleam in her eyes.    
  
“It’s not that,” I say, following her into the kitchen, where she pulls a can of something I recognize from drinking with Finnick as beer from the fridge and tosses it to me. I turn my lip up at it and she laughs. 

  


“I know, it tastes like if someone pissed in apple juice,” she says. “But you could use a drink and I remember last time you got into the hard stuff.”    
  
My bachelorette party. She’s right. After that night, when Peeta wanted so badly to be held, and we got in such trouble for her desk in front of the door stunt that Effie Trinket all but threatened my sister. I wouldn’t be able to see her again until the wedding, and I was so furious at myself for putting Prim in danger that I ended up taking every drink Johanna Mason pushed my way. I flush just thinking about what a mess I was that night -- I even threatened to fire Finnick as my maid of honor when she suggested I take it easy on the gin. 

  


“I don’t really drink,” I say. “I learned my lesson.”    
  
“That was a lifetime ago,” she says. “Come on, Everdeen. It’s fine.  _ If  _ you listen to me this time, I promise you won’t get a hangover.”    
  
I sigh and crack open the beer. 

  


“Atta girl,” she says, tipping her own towards me, as if to show her respect. “You know, they pulled that shit with Annie. After her games.”    
  
“The face shit?”    
  
Finnick’s eyebrows lift at this. 

  


Right. I’m the exception, not getting the cosmetic surgery after my Games. Most other Victors would either be of age when they won or their mentors would have signed the forms for it.    
  
“The memory shit,” I say. 

  


“It was all very . . . experimental, at the time,” says Finnick. And then, “I guess it still is. But -- Annie was never ready. For the Games.” She snorts. “Ready for the games. No one ever is. But they made it very clear at the training camp that no one was to volunteer that year. So in she went. And you remember, right?”    
  
“Yeah,” I say. “She saw her District Partner get decapitated. They said it drove her--”  _ mad _ . But I don’t say the word, now. It feels derisive. “So, what happened after that?”    
  
“So, it was too much,” Finnick says. “She had lost her mother. Before the Reaping. When I --” those eyes slid shut for a moment. “So I wasn’t around. I couldn’t be. Not enough, not when they had me -- fucking -- stuck out here.”    
  
She’s been this angry for years, obviously. At herself, at the Capitol. Both, I think.    
  
Her eyes open, though she doesn’t look any calmer. “They finally let me go, long enough to go get her ready for the Victory Tour, and she was -- things were so bad. They decided to just . . . take it away. And -- I had wished before, so many times, that I could do that for her. Just carry it. But she had to see it again. Over and over.”    
  
She chugged the rest of the can and then leaned against the counter with it, crushing it.    
  
“But she didn’t forget you,” I say.    
  
“She didn’t forget me,” Finnick agrees, digging into the fridge for another can. “But -- um-- some things got fuzzy. Which complicated things between us for a long time.”    
  
“But then she remembered,” I say.    
  
“Not exactly,” Finnick says, frowning. “More like -- she learned again.”    
  
Oh. That wasn’t what I wanted to hear. “Why are you telling me this?” I ask, taking a sip of the beer. I hate it, still, but Finnick seemed so certain that a drink would help.    
  
“Because you’re jealous of my wife,” Finnick says simply. She doesn’t sound upset, though I know how protective she is of Annie. “But as it stands now . . . Annie might be the closest thing Peeta has to someone who understands what she’s going through.”    
  
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m awful for being jealous. I get it. Is that really why you brought me out here?”    
  
“I never called you awful. And as far as being jealous goes . . . I would be, too. If our situations were reversed,” Finnick assures me, a foot coming up to rest on the cabinet door. “You love her. And it must be hard, being there, of all places. With her around. I just thought you might want to get out for a little while.”    
  
“I don’t want to get out,” I lie. “I want her back.”    
  
It’s Finnick’s hesitation here that I hate the most.    
  
“Out with it,” I say. 

  


“She won’t be the same,” she says. “Not exactly. It’s less a matter of getting her back as she was. It’s more like . . . waiting for her to be ready to grow back towards you. Whatever that looks like once she does.”     
  
Now I do chug the rest of my beer. 

  
  


Finnick manages to bully me into the sitting room and settle me between her legs so she can fuss over my hair again. She isn’t wrong, of course. So much of my once-long hair had fallen off between the start of the war and now, but Finnick is apparently some sort of miracle worker when it comes to protective styling.    
  
As always, it comes back to Annie. Finnick tells me about how Annie’s hair falls out in chunks when she’s stressed. How the Capitol always put the fake stuff back in, just like they did with Peeta’s when I cut it, but that Annie hated the extensions as well. The way Finnick spoke to her, it was like even just being here, a few streets away, was hard. It would be impossible to, knowing the way they feel about each other.  

  
“Your mother made me promise to try to get you to consider coming out to District Four.”    
  
I snort. “To get my sister to consider coming out to District Four, you mean.”    
  
“Both of you,” she says. “She misses you. She said--”    
  
“I’m not leaving Peeta,” I snap.    
  
“That’s not what she’s asking,” Finnick says. “Look. They’re still filling out that new hospital, and some of the best head doctors in the Capitol are planning to ship out. They’d see Peeta, and you could get out of this place.”    
  
“I didn’t realize you and my mother were so close.”    
  
“We aren’t.”    
  
“Close enough for you to--”    
  
“Yes, that’s what’s happening,” says Finnick, finally sounding annoyed. She’s still gentle, though, as she taps my shoulder with her hand to indicate that she’s done and pulling her legs up onto the couch so she can climb away without climbing over me. “It’s not that , I’m worried about my friend, sitting around wasting away in a fucking ghost town,” she raises her voice, though not to a shout, as she heads for the kitchen, just enough for me to hear her. “I just got really,  _ really  _ close to a forty year old widow I see a couple times a month, and she convinced me to do her dirty work for her.”    
  
Oh. Hearing it put that way, I flush with embarrassment. “Well, you shouldn’t worry about me,” I say. “I can take care of myself.” 

  


Finnick snorts, tossing me a bag of potato chips as she comes back in from the kitchen. “Yeah. Looks like it, doesn’t it?” she says.    
  
I roll my eyes. 

  


“Listen, listen,” she says, pouring herself over the armrest and laying back against it. “You would be worried, too. If our situations were reversed.”    
  
She’s right. I would be worried. But then -- if I still had Peeta . . . it’s hard to imagine anything that wouldn’t be different. 

  


. . .

  


“I shouldn’t be giving this to you.”    
  
Effie Trinket never made any effort to be quiet, but the morning after my bachelorette party, it seemed she was being even more grating than usual. Finnick had made me chug glass after glass of water before she allowed me to climb into my gigantic, empty bed, claiming that it was going to help me in the morning, but my head hurt so badly.    
  
“But the sweetheart just begged and begged,” she continued, moving her wrist to wiggle the envelope, just out of my reach. Though my head throbbed when it moved, I reached to snatch it and she stepped back, always so poised in her high-heels. “Ah, ah,” she said. “As I was  _ saying  _ \-- though there isn’t exactly a rule against letters, it’s certainly against the spirit of the law.”    
  


“Effie,” I groaned, my head on fire. “Please.”    
  
“Fine,” she said, finally surrendering the envelope. “It  _ is  _ incredibly sweet,” she said. “And can you imagine? She spend her party writing to you. It’s all so romantic. You must be so excited to finally marry her.”    
  
Finally. Right. “We can’t wait,” I agreed. 

  
  


Effie was right about Peeta’s letter being sweet. Four pages long, somehow, written in her familiar and careful handwriting. She wrote about how much she missed me, how no one could keep us apart once things were official. And then she wrote, in what would have looked like a pivot to anyone else who might read the letter -- about how she was thinking of the time I showed her my house in the Seam. She wrote that it was a perfect night, that she was still thinking about how perfect I looked that night. 

  


Finnick didn’t wait for me to answer her knock before she came in with what she called her hangover cure. Three pieces of toast, a mountain of french fries, greasy fried eggs, and a thick chocolate milkshake. She sat on the end of my bed and relayed stories Annie had told her about the other party last night. About Peeta being such a melancholy drunk that she insisted on sneaking away to work on her novel of a letter to me every so often. 

  
“They’re going to come get you for the initial beauty workup soon,” she warned me. “You’d better get going on these fries. I can’t promise when the next time they’ll let you eat is.”    
  
I didn’t see Peeta again until the wedding ceremony. It was held in the President’s Mansion, which we didn’t find ourselves invited to particularly often. Not that I wanted to be there more than was completely necessary, anyway. It had been endless hours of plucking and waxing and shaping before they let me go to sleep the night before, and then it started again the day of, only worse. 

  


Haymitch was the one who walked first Peeta, and then me down the aisle. I watched her as we glided down the aisle -- something that had been choreographed and rehearsed for months, and tried to reconcile the made-up girl standing in wait by the altar against the one I married a few months prior. 

  
I thought of her the way she wanted to get married. It was hard to imagine anything that would have been a further cry from what she chose to wear that day. The skirt was gigantic, puffy and white and no doubt incredibly heavy, and the bodice was laced up against her so tightly that even down the aisle, I could see the way that her skin spilled out. Her veil had been turned back already, but it was still long enough to float over her shoulders and down to the ground around her skirt.    
  
My dress was simple, but only by comparison. My sleeves were long, but only to make up for them deciding not to put me in the same kind of elbow-length white gloves that they put my fiance in. There were pearls sewn along the dress, and heavy, gauzy lace. The fabric of the gown clung against my hips and legs all the way down to the train. Haymitch put my hand in Peeta’s and she squeezed it reassuringly. 

  


“Don’t let go of me,” I whispered when her grip started to loosen. It was what she said to me, during the chariot ride. I could tell she remembered, based on the way those impossibly blue eyes softened.    
  
Her lipstick was rosy and pink, almost a little metallic. Her eyes were made to look larger, eyelashes impossibly thick and long, and her cheeks a little flushed.    
  
“Never,” she whispered back, and the officiant made a pointed joke about not talking until he gave us the all right, and all the Capitolites who ranked highly enough to get an invitation to the wedding howled with laughter. 

  
. . . 

  


Finnick and I return to the Tribute Center to find Annie and Peeta in the service kitchen, copping at vegetables for what’s apparently some time-intensive District Four meal. Peeta looks far and away more comfortable than I’ve seen her in such a long time, and I feel ridiculous for begrudging her this. This friendship with Annie Cresta, who makes her look like she feels safe, at last. 

  


I feel even more ridiculous when Finnick crosses the kitchen and catches Annie by the waist, kissing at the side of her face. And again, at her neck.    
  
“We’re making your favorite,” Annie murmurs, turning her head up so she can kiss her. “I’ve been telling Peeta about how beautiful it is in District Four.” 

  
“They’re relentless,” I say, taking a carrot from Peeta’s cutting board popping it into my mouth. “I’ve been getting the highlight reel all day, too. Won’t be surprised if Prim decides to outvote me and--”    
  
“You’re leaving?”    
  
Her voice is a little flat. Not surprised, exactly, but maybe only because she can’t read me anymore.    
  
“I--”    
  
“It’s fine,” she interrupts, turning back to her veggies. “I mean, it’s not like I thought you were going to move--”    
  
“That’s not--” I try. 

  


The knife starts to move a little faster, now. “No. It’s fine,” she says. “I mean, you don’t owe me anything. If you want to go to District Four, you should --  _ ow! Fuck!”  _

  
She drops the knife, cradling the tips of her fingers in the palm of her other hand, but not before I see the blood on the cutting board. And it’s like, for a moment, I become so stupid that I forget everything that’s happened between us. I grab her wrist and haul her over to the sink, trying not to focus too much on the way she’s shaking. Or that it’s the first time I’ve touched her since before the war. 

  


“Hold it under the water,” I order.    
  
Her mouth opens and closes twice before she shuts it and nods. I check under the sink for the first aid kid, but the only one I know about is in the bathroom attached to my room. 

  


“Peeta.”    
  
She looks more than a little out of it. I have to say her name again twice before she looks up at me.    
  
“There’s a first aid kit in my room,” I say, pressing a wad of paper towels into her dry hand and waiting for her hand to curl around it, though loosely. “Pressure, all right? Can you follow me?”    
  
She blinks. “Yeah,” she rasps. “Or -- I can just go downstairs. If that’s easier.”    
  
“No. You don’t need stitches, and they’ll just--” tell you you aren’t allowed to come back upstairs with me, since I let you use a knife. “Take forever. Come on.”    
  
She’s trembling, hard, but she sits atop the closed toilet and lets me fuss over her with rubbing alcohol and antibiotic cream. I’m just trying to figure out how best to wrap it when she says,    
  
“You’ve done this before.”    
  
“Well. Prim’s a healer. You know that,” I say, trying to sound nonchalant.    
  
“That’s not what I meant.” She’s looking at her fingers so intently I’m afraid they might start bleeding again. She’s frowning as I crouch in front of her with the little box of bandages. 

  


“Give me your hand,” I say, and she allows me to fuss over where best to put the adhesive part, but then, when I’m about to stand back up, she grabs it, suddenly, and squeezes it tightly.    
  
“Sorry,” she says, letting go of me and covering the spot on her other arm with her hand. The one with the scars. “I just . . . remember,” she says. “It was my arm. And -- hydrogen peroxide, and me being -- I guess, embarrassed.”    
  
Oh. 

  


It was a hard night. Not long after I ended up at her house in the Victor’s Village. One where she and I had both expected I would be sleeping at my own place. I snuck in and found her wandering in one of the guest rooms, long sleeved shirt pulled down to her wrist, but not enough to hide the fact that something was very, very wrong. 

  


“Nothing to be embarrassed about,” I say. I said something similar that night, though I’m not sure whether she remembers that, as well. “It happened a few times. At least, that you let me know about. You didn’t really love the attention, but . . . I guess I just never knew how to leave you alone when you needed someone.”   
  
“I think I kinda did. Like the attention, I mean,” she argues, but very softly. “I mean -- it’s all kind of . . . mixed up.” she gestures vaguely towards her head. “But I remember feeling . . . very affectionate.Towards you.”    
  


Affectionate. It’s more than I’ve gotten from her in so very long. “Oh,” I say, leaning back against the sink. “I was feeling very affectionate towards you, too,” I admit.    
  
“So then, when are you leaving?” she asks,    
  
“Peeta. Obviously, I’m not,” I say. “That’s what I was trying to tell you earlier. I know you don’t remember. But -- maybe you will. I wouldn’t leave you out here alone.”   
  
Her eyes drift shut at this, and I wonder if maybe I ought to just leave well enough alone.    
  
“Probably couldn’t leave you alone in District Four.”    
  
. . . 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to Jobanana7 for betaing!!


End file.
